Buxton Hudgins Lavigne 2024

• Quoted text from the Methods section of the article:

We created a binary variable, where values of 1-3 were considered ‘good self-rated mental health’. Research by Statistics Canada found that CCHS respondents with mental morbidity had significantly higher odds of reporting fair or poor self-rated mental health than did those not classified with mental morbidity, suggesting that binary self-rated mental health is a useful metric for general mental health.

• My translation:

Researchers organized the response data into two groups. They labelled one of the groups as ‘good self-rated mental health,’ and in it they placed all of the survey answers where participants selected categories 1 to 3 as responses to the question about their mental health. The second group, categorized as poor self-rated mental health, consisted of answers where people rated their mental health as ‘fair’ or ‘poor.’ Researchers decided to group response data in this way because other Canadian Community Health Survey data from Statistics Canada showed that people with mental illnesses or disorders were more likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor, than those who were not identified as having mental illnesses or disorders. Researchers concluded that they could rely on separating people’s perceptions of their mental health into the two groups as a good way of getting a sense of people’s overall mental health.

• Quoted text from the Introduction section of the article:

However, how contact with biodiversity leads to better mental health and wellbeing outcomes is not well understood. Studies have found beneficial relationships between the number and abundance of species and self-reported well-being, pleasure, connectedness to nature, overall health, stress, anxiety, and depression.

• My translation:

We do not know that much about how interacting with a variety of natural environments and beings – such as plants and animals – improves people’s mental health and well-being. We do know from research that the more variety there is in nature, the more positively people tend to describe their own well-being, pleasure, how connected to nature they feel, and also their overall health, and the levels of stress, anxiety and depression they experience.

• Quoted text from the Results section in the article:

Living in a postal code with tree species richness of 14.24, one standard deviation more than the mean (6.83 tree species), increased the likelihood of reporting good mental health by 5.36% (CI = 2. 79-7.86%; Fig. 2). Living in a postal code with a bird Shannon diversity of 1.12 – one standard deviation (0.36) more than the mean (1.51) – increased the likelihood of reporting good mental health by 6.64% (CI= 4.11-9.12%; Fig. 2).

• My translation:

The study shows that people who live in an area that has more of a variety of trees than an average neighbourhood, are more likely to feel that they have good mental health. People who live in an area that has more of a variety of birds than an average neighbourhood also are more likely to feel good about their mental health.

• Quoted text from the Discussion section of the article:

Our analysis was ecological and cross-sectional and relied on self-perceived indicators of mental health, limiting our ability to draw firm causal links between bird and tree diversity and mental health. For example, people with better mental health may choose to live in areas with higher biodiversity.

• My translation:

When doing this study, researchers focused on one-time responses from a large group of people who were describing their own mental health. This kind of a study does not allow the researchers to say with confidence that a greater variety of birds and trees is the factor that causes an improvement in mental health. For example, people who already have better mental health might decide to live in neighbourhoods where natural environments have a greater variety of plants, animals and other species.

Future research might want to look at how people who live in neighbourhoods with lower biodiversity experience natural environments, compared to people who live in neighbourhoods with greater biodiversity. Using interviews as the research method for this kind of a study could give researchers a more in-depth understanding of place-specific similarities and differences between how and why natural environments and biodiversity are important to people’s mental health.

I found it challenging to keep track of all the different indices, models and measures the researchers combined in the study, and to understand what these measures tell us. Reading this article left me wondering how people perceive and experience biodiversity in their neighbourhood: what birds or trees they might notice, what senses they use to perceive biodiversity, and how their way of perceiving the natural world around them impacts their mental health.