Have you ever mentally mapped the streets between your home and your workplace, emphasizing these two places without visualizing everything in between? Or between your apartment and your favorite coffee shop? It seems that, in our heads, the distance between the locations we’re interested in doesn’t exist… or at least not as far as it actually is.

We humans tend to represent space topologically , that is, by looking at how the places we know and inhabit are organized and related. We call mental maps (or psychogeographic maps ) these subjective graphic representations of lived space, which allow for a free interpretation of the landscape in relation to emotions .

How we see ourselves in space

These maps are the result of our subjective perception of the living space in which they are inserted.

For example, we can make a map of the places we’ve met up with our college friends, or a neighborhood map of the places we routinely visit. We’ll identify feelings and perceptions that are more or less positive or negative: pleasant or unpleasant places, relaxing or stressful, safe or unsafe, scary places, happy or sad places…

They also make it possible to observe people’s spatial thinking . Thanks to maps, we learn how we orient ourselves, how we structure space, and how we identify landmarks, borders, neighborhoods, paths, and nodes by graphically representing the environment in which we move, live, and develop routinely. They are considered useful cognitive resources in the geography of perception .

A person’s level of cognitive maturity, along with their capacity for abstract spatial thinking, determine their ability to create a structured cartographic composition, with varying degrees of detail complexity, regardless of its Cartesian quality. They also help us analyze how each person perceives their living space and what habits, values, beliefs, and feelings they have.

In addition, they allow us to recognize the “ funds of knowledge ,” that is, everything we know and learn – culturally, institutionally, socially, and geographically – throughout our lives.

Know the movements to get to know the person

Because of this relationship between spaces and the mind, geographical subdisciplines such as the geography of emotions, psychogeography, and psychoanalytic geography have begun to emerge.

These studies study the moods of chronically ill patients or social groups, seeking the interrelationship between emotions and human behavior, and between these and places, habitat, and the social, cultural, and economic environment. It can be seen, for example, how the prevalence of depression decreases as people’s spatial mobility increases and social interactions, experiences, and perceptions of places multiply.

Technology, in fact, offers new possibilities in the study of this field. Georeferenced data from mobile communications, shared locations on the internet, or digital payment transactions provide information about people’s daily lives. This allows for the creation of personalized mood maps that pinpoint places of greater or lesser stress in daily life. This maps the emotions of the places we access physically or online, as well as our feelings and experiences.

With these maps, we can offer psychological therapies that focus on the analysis of a person’s everyday places, addressing mental health as a priority in today’s society. For example, in the case of anxiety disorders, we can identify toxic places, places of fear, and analyze the triggering factors in those places at those times.

The census as a tool for care

Transdisciplinary research can also be conducted between geographers, psychotherapists and computer engineers.

Let’s take the United States as an example. There is a precedent here for the so-called “Maps of Despair ,” developed from a telephone survey of the mood of more than 2.4 million people. The objective was to assess mental health at the regional level and obtain information for planning and organizing health services, aiming to direct resources to those areas where they were most needed.

In addition to this assessment, with a combination of data, we could produce psychogeographic reports that go further. How would we do this? Using the census. In the US, to collect demographic data in population centers, the smallest unit of measurement used is the census tract. Therefore, if we analyzed their census tracts , we could combine statistical data with people’s environments and behaviors and be more precise.

In Europe, there are also challenges that psychogeographic research can address . For example, analyzing the connections between disorders such as anxiety or depression and their relationship with the affected person’s home. Statistical indicators such as residential density, available space per dwelling, green spaces, cultural facilities, unemployment, medication use, aging, violence against women, etc., would be examined.

In fact, in Spain, census data at the sub-municipal level could be compared with census tracts in the United States. Thus, in future research, we could identify areas of particular incidence and select communities for experimental research. The next challenge would be to establish community psychosocial therapies in vulnerable areas based on the psychogeographic data obtained.

Thus, our ability to draw the space we occupy could help us manage how we feel when inhabiting it.

Author Bio: Carlos Ferrás Sexto is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Santiago de Compostela