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.

在过去的二十年中，虽然有超过24万名美国学生经历了一次学校枪击事件，但对于这些事件对幸存青年的心理健康的影响知之甚少。使用2006年至2015年的大规模处方数据，我们研究了44次学校枪击事件对青少年抗抑郁药使用的影响。我们的经验策略将在经历过枪击事件的学校（治疗区域）外练习0到5英里的医疗服务提供者开出的抗抑郁药处方数量与在10到15英里以外的学校里练习的抗抑郁药的处方数量（参考地区）进行比较。射击后。我们在所有规格中都包括按月和按地区划分的固定效应，从而控制了抗抑郁药的总体使用趋势以及各个地区的所有时不变性。我们发现，在接下来的2年中，局部暴露于致命的学校枪击事件会使青少年使用抗抑郁药的人数增加21.4％。在精神卫生服务提供者密度较高的地区，这些影响较小，这些提供者侧重于行为干预而非药物干预。