ArticleSSM - population health2021
Debts of despair: Education, financial losses, and precursors of deaths of despair.
Article in SSM - population health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Racial discrimination in healthcare and public settings as a predictor of suicidal ideation onset among U.S. Adults with baseline depressive symptoms.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Article
- Deaths of despair in England, 2014-2022: trends by sex and socioeconomic deprivation before and after COVID-19.International journal of public health · 2026Article
- Education, Religious Attendance, and Precursors to Deaths of Despair in the United States.Journal of religion and health · 2025Article
- Trends in educational inequalities in all-course mortality and deaths of despair in Swedish youths 1990-2018.SSM - population health · 2025Article
- "Deaths of despair" over the business cycle: New estimates from a shift-share instrumental variables approach.Economics and human biology · 2024Article
- Geographically specific associations between county-level socioeconomic and household distress and mortality from drug poisoning, suicide, alcohol, and homicide among working-age adults in the United States.SSM - population health · 2024Article
- Identifying at-risk individuals for diseases of despair through integration of clinical practice and social service systems.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2024Article
- Trends in cause-specific mortality: deaths of despair in Spain, 1980-2019.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Deaths of Despair: A Scoping Review on the Social Determinants of Drug Overdose, Alcohol-Related Liver Disease and Suicide.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Recent deaths of despair literature hypothesizes that financial losses are a key mechanism through which education is associated with higher risk for drug use, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation. However, few studies have empirically assessed the significance of this harmful pathway or compared it to other hypothesized explanations. Drawing on data from over 8000 respondents in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this paper finds that lower education-levels are associated with heightened risk of drug use, painkiller use, frequent binge drinking, and suicidal ideation; in turn, decompositions reveal that financial losses mediate about 20 percent of the association between education with drug use and suicidal ideation. The results support a core assumption of the deaths of despair hypothesis-that financial losses among those with low education-levels drive the increase in harmful despair-associated behaviors, which often precede disease and mortality. Future research should extend this work by linking individual-level socioeconomic and health patterns with broader economic changes to better understand how individuals' educational attainment interacts with macro-level structural factors to shape their vulnerability to despair-associated disease and death.
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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.