Trial reportHealth policy and planning2020
The worse the better? Quantile treatment effects of a conditional cash transfer programme on mental health.
Trial report in Health policy and planning, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of cash transfers on subjective well-being and mental health in low- and middle-income countries.Nature human behaviour · 2022Pooled it
- Trial
- Article
- Can cash transfers protect mental health? Evidence from an observational cohort of children and adolescents living in adverse contexts in Brazil.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2025Observational
- E = mcEpilepsia open · 2024Article
- Response: Commentary: Quantile treatment effect of zinc lozenges on common cold duration: a novel approach to analyze the effect of treatment on illness duration.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2024Article
- Reprioritising global mental health: psychoses in sub-Saharan Africa.International journal of mental health systems · 2023Article
- Mental health and life-course shocks in a low-income country: Evidence from Malawi.SSM - population health · 2022Article
- Quantile Treatment Effect of Zinc Lozenges on Common Cold Duration: A Novel Approach to Analyze the Effect of Treatment on Illness Duration.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2022Review
- COVID-19 mental health impact and responses in low-income and middle-income countries: reimagining global mental health.The lancet. Psychiatry · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Poor mental health is a pressing global health problem, with high prevalence among poor populations from low-income countries. Existing studies of conditional cash transfer (CCT) effects on mental health have found positive effects. However, there is a gap in the literature on population-wide effects of cash transfers on mental health and if and how these vary by the severity of mental illness. We use the Malawian Longitudinal Study of Family and Health containing 790 adult participants in the Malawi Incentive Programme, a year-long randomized controlled trial. We estimate average and distributional quantile treatment effects and we examine how these effects vary by gender, HIV status and usage of the cash transfer. We find that the cash transfer improves mental health on average by 0.1 of a standard deviation. The effect varies strongly along the mental health distribution, with a positive effect for individuals with worst mental health of about four times the size of the average effect. These improvements in mental health are associated with increases in consumption expenditures and expenditures related to economic productivity. Our results show that CCTs can improve adult mental health for the poor living in low-income countries, particularly those with the worst mental health.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.