Rats In Neighborhoods Can Affect Mental Health, Says Study

In poor localities, rats tend to affect mental health as much as abandoned homes, violent behaviour and drugs, according to a new study.

"Nobody likes living around rats," study leader Danielle German, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said.

"This study provides very strong evidence that rats are an underappreciated stressor that affects how people feel about their lives in low-income neighborhoods. The good news is it's modifiable. If we can do something to reduce the number of rats in these neighborhoods, we can improve people's well-being," she said.

However, the study did not show a cause-and-effect link between rats and depression.

Experts studied 450 people in poverty-stricken areas of Baltimore, among which about 87 percent were black while 55 percent were male.

About half the participants saw rats in the locality at least once a week. More than one-third said they saw them every day; 13 percent saw them at home, and 5 percent said it happened every day or almost every day. More than half said rats indicate a bad neighbourhood.

Almost 32 percent of the participants felt that rats were a big problem. While 80 percent saw rodents every day, 85 percent saw them in their neighborhood, according to the study.

Those who considered them to be a problem tended to be 72 percent more likely to have depressive symptoms, such as sadness and anxiety, compared to others in neighborhoods where they were not a significant problem.

The findings are published in the March 2016 issue of the Journal of Community Psychology.