ABSTRACT
Residents of socially and economically deprived communities experience worse health outcomes on average than those living in more prosperous areas (Ellen et al., 2001). Research has shown that this is in part because people with similar characteristics, such as income level, age and employment status, cluster together (Congdon, 2006) and in part because individuals living in the same neighbourhood are subject to common contextual influences, such as higher crime rates and lower social cohesion (Walters et al., 2004; Merlo et al., 2005; Congdon, 2006). Studies to establish the impact of geographical variations on mental illnesses have found that once individual characteristics have been taken into account, the amount of variation attributed to the higher levels is very small (Stafford and Marmot, 2003; Walters et al., 2004; Skapinakis et al., 2005; Weich et al., 2005; Fone et al., 2007; Peterson et al., 2009).
