Emergency Department visits for depression following police killings of unarmed African Americans

Previous literature on racism and adverse mental health largely focuses on individual-level exposures. We investigate whether and to what extent structural racism, as measured by police killings of unarmed African Americans, affect a severe and acute mental health outcome among African Americans: de...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social science & medicine (1982) 2021-01, Vol.269, p.113561-113561, Article 113561
Main Authors: Das, Abhery, Singh, Parvati, Kulkarni, Anju K., Bruckner, Tim A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Arrests
Bias
Counties
Depression
Emergency department
Emergency services
Help seeking behavior
Hospitals
Individual differences
Mental depression
Mental health
Offenses
Police
Police community relations
Police killings
Policy making
Population growth
Prevention programs
Racial bias
Racial disparity
Racism
States
Surveillance
Systemic racism
Violent crime
Visits
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Previous literature on racism and adverse mental health largely focuses on individual-level exposures. We investigate whether and to what extent structural racism, as measured by police killings of unarmed African Americans, affect a severe and acute mental health outcome among African Americans: depression-related Emergency Department (ED) visits. We used police killings of unarmed African Americans as our exposure and depression-related ED visits (per 100,000 population) as our outcome. We examined the relation across 75 counties from five US states between 2013 and 2015 (2700 county-months). Linear fixed effect analyses controlled for time-invariant county-factors as well as the number of hospitals and arrests for violent crimes (per 100,000 population). Police killings of unarmed African Americans correspond with an 11% increase in ED visits per 100,000 population related to depression among African Americans in the concurrent month and three months following the exposure (p 
ISSN:0277-9536
1873-5347
DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113561