Andrea Mechelli

We found that there was one aspect that has the strongest effect.

And that's nature.

Yeah.

My name is Andrea Michelli.

I'm a professor of early intervention in mental health at King's College, London.

I'm a clinical psychologist and I've worked in the NHS for several years.

And one thing I did notice is that when people move from the countryside to London, where I worked, often they will struggle.

with their mental health.

And this is something that is reflected in the literature.

People who live in cities are more vulnerable to developing mental health issues.

So I wanted to understand why.

What we found was that when people heard birds song or they saw birds, their stress level would decrease and their mood would improve.

And there's also an aspect which to me was a little surprising, but they also felt less lonely.

Even if there weren't other people around, they still felt less lonely after seeing birds or hearing birdsong.

So these are improvements in mental wellbeing that people experience immediately, but they also accumulate over time and can even protect people from changes in their mood or experiencing high levels of stress.

The improvement in stress and mood perhaps were expected, but the fact that people felt less lonely, I think that's interesting because we often think that loneliness is about lack of people, but maybe loneliness can be a lack of the natural world around us.

For me, it's really important to work with policy stakeholders to disseminate the findings as widely as possible so people are aware that this is very much an untapped resource, something that is very accessible to us.

So my research right now focuses on the mental health benefits of nature.

I'm also very interested in climate change because, of course, climate change affects everything.

We also find that nature can help mitigate the negative impacts of climate change, for example, extreme heat and air pollution, which I have started to write about in a Substack called Wild Minds.