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Listen to this – mental disorders and noise

The sounds of nature have been replaced by a cacophony of noise in the city and it wreaks havoc with my mental health

May 28, 2025

Five days a week, I travel into Vancouver from Surrey using public transit. I use the Expo Line. It is loud, screechy and nerve-racking. The suffering and anxiety I feel from the oblique noise of metal carriage wheels grinding against the tracks gets louder and worse every year. It intensifies  my anxiety, which is hardly mitigated by using earplugs. I notice that the Canada Line is not as distressing because it is a better constructed transit system as it was built before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics to shuttle athletes and tourists into the city from the airport.

I suffer from a mental disorder and I have discovered that city noises trigger my illness. There have been many studies done showing it is more likely for people to be diagnosed with schizophrenia in fast-paced urban centres than in neighbouring rural areas. I am not surprised. The stress of noise pollution in the city is an aspect of environmental degradation rarely given much attention, and I believe that this specific kind of pollution is a mental health stressor that can exacerbate many mental disorders. 

I believe I was not meant to live with the constant stress of vehicles swooshing by me at a faster and denser pace. The city wells up and contains itself with engine noises. There is little green space and city buildings, whether made of glass or mortar, are monstrosities that are ugly to look at and complement noisy gas-guzzling engines. 

Even if we have parks, often times they do little to stop the stress of white noise — a constant city hum that never seems to go away.

I remember when I was homeless living in the Downtown Eastside, I would walk the streets accosted by the cacophony of cars, trucks and motorbikes on a 24-hour basis. It was a really difficult time in my life as I walked about in a dazed fashion, my mental disorder in full-swing.

At Simon Fraser University, I studied under professor Barry Truax and he edited a work along with R. Murray Schafer called The World Soundscape Project’s Handbook of Acoustic Ecology. In that work from 1978, they describe: “The soundscape is our sonic environment, the ever-present array of noises, pleasant and unpleasant, loud and soft, heard or ignored, that we all live with. In these times when the world is suffering from an overpopulation of sounds, particularly technological sounds, the subject of sound is becoming fashionable for discussion and study.” 

Truax is a well-known Canadian composer whose works for computer and electronic tapes have been performed in almost every European country and Canada. He really opened my ears to the problem of noise pollution. His ideas in Acoustic Communication, another work from 1974, stuck with me.  It describes acoustic and aural experience, and how they’ve been radically altered  by technology. He points out that for people living in a technological society, noise becomes a fact of life, something that either one puts up with by desensitizing oneself, or complains about in the small hope that some relief may be attained.

His solution is that we need to listen more and shouldn’t just shut out and ignore our environment. Becoming aware of what we are losing, such as the extinction of green space and animal sounds, is crucial. For Truax, listening is our only means of contact with our aural environment. He believes if listening is not practised we will lose all of the human benefits it can provide.

So as I search for green space in the urban environment, I also clamour for quiet and peaceful sounds. I gravitate towards places like Stanley Park or Jericho beach where I can listen to the soothing waves of the Pacific Ocean pass through my ears and give me a reprieve from the constant hum of noise produced by the city.

I may be ultra-sensitive because I am a musician, but I think we get de-sensitized as city dwellers. The Industrial Revolution forever changed the soundscape of our environment which, in the 21st century, is getting worse. When we lose an entire species, we also lose their unique voices, which is a kind of silence I mourn. Let me listen to the Western screech owl; let me listen to the marbled murrelet. 

One way I self-nurture is to go to Watershed Park in North Delta and hug the tallest tree. It is the sound of rain and thunder, streams and oceans which soothes me. I need times of silence to regenerate my soul and we need to celebrate the sound of grasshoppers, bees and dragonflies, frogs and birdsong, wolves and elk, rivers and forests, which are either receding or disappearing from our environment.

Becoming aware is the first step and that means listening. Hopefully more of us will do this on a regular basis.

Jathinder Sandhu is a Surrey resident and a published poet, writer and member of The Shift peer newsroom. She won writing contests in high school, studied poetry post-secondary and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in communications. Jathinder also plays bass guitar.

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