Local Exposure to School Shootings and Youth Antidepressant Use
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.
Non-Technical Summaries
- In the two years following a fatal shooting, antidepressant prescriptions for young people living near the affected school were 21...
Published Versions
Maya Rossin-Slater & Molly Schnell & Hannes Schwandt & Sam Trejo & Lindsey Uniat, 2020. "Local exposure to school shootings and youth antidepressant use," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 117(38), pages 23484-23489. citation courtesy of