Social Relations and Mental Health in Segregated Settlement Parts

Abstract

Introduction: Social relationships have a basic effect on the general well-being and mental health of people. Insufficient social connections can lead to dysfunctions in the life of the person and it can cause mental disorders. The aim of the paper is to study this statement in case of people living in disadvantaged areas and address their social network and mental health. People living in these areas are often geographically segregated also; they are multiply deprived, being generally the poorest and the least educated group, with the highest unemployment rate. These situations can often lead to the narrowing of their relations to the majority population, making successful social integration and social mobility impossible for them. This can lead to a high degree of hopelessness among them, which can also affect their mental health status.
Methods: The study introduces the social network and mental health status of people who are living in two, geographically segregated areas of a county town (Nyíregyháza), in the North-East of Hungary. The database comes from a questionnaire-based research fulfilled in the spring of 2019. In the research there were 271 households asked from two blocks of flats.
Results: Based on our data, we can conclude that the extent of social networks of people living here is significantly different from town-level and country-level data: they have less confidants, friends and the structure of their weak ties is also different. Differences can be observed between the two blocks of flats as well in terms of the network indicators: people living in the bigger block of flats have a narrower social network, and less confidants and friends. In connection with mental health status we can say, that the studied population’s situation is worse in terms of general mood and the level of vitality than it is the case with the whole population of the same city. A higher rate of those living here is affected by constant or regular negative mood. At the same time, the positive mental well-being and the feeling of vitality are less common among them.
Conclusions: There are differences between the mental health status of people living in the two segregated block of flats: on the one hand, there is a higher rate of the more frequent feeling of depression and exhaustion among people living in the bigger block of flats. On the other hand, there is a higher rate of those people who feel lots of energy. Regarding the mental health status of people living in the smallest block of flats there is a high rate of them who feel themselves nervous in general and frequent. While the frequent exhaustion feeling is not so high among them compared to people living in the other block of flats. From among the different types of social relationships, the number of friends and the mentalhealth of the studied population show a significant relationship: the higher number of friends contributes to certain dimensions of the positive mental health status.