Effects of community stress and problems on residents' psychopathology

The connection between community stress and problems and community residents' psychopathology is an understudied area, and a limited number of studies have reported inconsistent findings. This research aimed to estimate the effect of perceived social factors in the community environment on the residents' self-reported psychopathology. The study sample consisted of 2034 men and women from 16 selected rural counties in three provinces of China. The social factors in the village community were measured by the World Health Organization Multisite Intervention Study on Suicidal Behaviors (WHO SUPRE-MISS) scale of Community Stress and Problems. The sychological and mental health of the individuals was assessed by (1) suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts (National Comorbidity Survey Replication or NCS-R), (2) pro-suicide attitudes (General Social Survey or GSS), (3) depression (Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale or CES-D) and (4) suicide ideation (Scale for Suicide Ideation or SSI). Multiple regressions were performed separately for each of the four psychopathologic traits with the scale of Community Stress and Problems as the major predicting variable and age, gender, education years, marital status, family annual income, family status in village and religion as the confounding correlates. It is found that community stress and problems generally increase rural Chinese residents' psychopathologies, especially issues in health care, housing and transportation, which play more important roles than others.