ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Local exposure to school shootings and youth antidepressant use.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 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
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Systematic Review of Nonmedical Costs of Firearm Injury.American journal of preventive medicine · 2026Pooled it
- The mental health sequelae of mass shootings on affected children, adolescents and young adults - a scoping review.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Review
- The Long-Term Impact of Adolescent Community Weapon-Related Violence Exposure on Depression: Insomnia as a Mediating Pathway.Journal of community psychology · 2026Article
- Parental perceptions of child and family mental health and behavioural adjustment following a mass school shooting in Serbia.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Silent echoes: understanding and predicting the widespread mental health impact of mass shootings.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Examining Subpopulation Differences in Self-Reported Mental Health Following the Robb Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas.SSM. Mental health · 2025Article
- The effect of mass shootings on voter turnout in the United States.Science advances · 2025Article
- Survivor perspectives on research priorities for assessing mental health outcomes after school shootings: a qualitative study.Injury epidemiology · 2025Article
- Article
- The Effects of the Flint water crisis on the educational outcomes of school-age children.Science advances · 2024Article
- Were COVID and the Great Recession well-being reducing?PloS one · 2024Article
- School shootings increase NRA donations.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
- Learning and happiness during Covid-19 school closure in urban Malaysia.International journal of educational development · 2023Article
- Coming together in a digital age: Community twitter responses in the wake of a campus shooting.PloS one · 2022Article
- Stress research during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Gun Violence Exposure and Experiences of Depression Among Mothers.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2021Article
- Effects of Mass Shootings on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents.Current psychiatry reports · 2021Review
- Invisible wounds: Community exposure to gun homicides and adolescents' mental health and behavioral outcomes.SSM - population health · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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. Our empirical strategy compares the number of antidepressant prescriptions written by providers practicing 0 to 5 miles from a school that experienced a shooting (treatment areas) to the number of prescriptions written by providers practicing 10 to 15 miles away (reference areas), both before and after the shooting. We include month-by-year and school-by-area fixed effects in all specifications, thereby controlling for overall trends in antidepressant use and all time-invariant differences across locations. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4% in the following 2 y. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.
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.