Collaborating to improve mental health in rural Australia

Sociology, with its long-standing preoccupation with processes of urbanisation and industrialisation, has tended to locate certain social concerns, such as mental health, as being largely urban phenomena or ignore the broader spatial dynamics which impact on such phenomena. Mental wellness of people living in rural regions of Australia is of vital sociological concern. Rural regions depend on a diversity of healthy, positive citizens to work and contribute to communities long into their lives. The reality is the opposite, with studies across Australia finding people living in rural regions and remote areas to be generally of poorer health than those in urban areas.