Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14238
Authors: Maya Rossin-Slater; Molly Schnell; Hannes Schwandt; Sam Trejo; Lindsey Uniat
Abstract: While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4 percent in the following two years. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.
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Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| local exposure to fatal school shootings (I24) | youth antidepressant use (J13) |
| youth antidepressant use (J13) | number of antidepressant prescriptions written to individuals under age 20 (J13) |
| availability of mental health care resources (I11) | youth antidepressant use (J13) |
| nonfatal school shootings (Y40) | youth antidepressant use (J13) |
| local exposure to fatal school shootings (I24) | increase in prescriptions (I11) |