-
- Gergő Baranyi, Mark Cherrie, Sarah Curtis, Chris Dibben, and Jamie R Pearce.
- Center for Research on Environment Society and Health, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Electronic address: gergo.baranyi@ed.ac.uk.
- Am J Prev Med. 2020 May 1; 58 (5): 638-647.
IntroductionAlthough neighborhood crime has been associated with mental health problems, longitudinal research utilizing objective measures of small-area crime and mental health service use is lacking. This study examines how local crime is associated with newly prescribed psychotropic medications in a large longitudinal sample of Scottish adults and explores whether the relationships vary between sociodemographic groups.MethodsData from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, a 5.3% representative sample of the population, were linked with police-recorded crime in 2011 for residential locality and with psychotropic medications from 2009 to 2014, extracted from the prescription data set of National Health Service Scotland. Individuals receiving medication during the first 6 months of observation were excluded; the remaining sample was followed for 5.5 years. Covariate-adjusted, multilevel mixed-effects logistic models estimated associations between area crime and prescriptions for antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anxiolytics (analyzed in 2018-2019).ResultsAfter adjustment for individual and neighborhood covariates, findings on 129,945 adults indicated elevated risk of antidepressant (OR=1.05, 95% CI=1.00, 1.10) and antipsychotic (OR=1.20, 95% CI=1.03, 1.39), but not anxiolytic (OR=0.99, 95% CI=0.93, 1.05) medication in high-crime areas. Crime showed stronger positive association with antidepressants among individuals (especially women) aged 24-53 years in 2009 and with antipsychotics among men aged 44-53 years in 2009. Skilled workers and people from lower nonmanual occupations had increased risk of medications in high-crime areas.ConclusionsLocal crime is an important predictor of mental health, independent of individual and other contextual risk factors. Place-based crime prevention and targeting vulnerable groups may have benefits for population mental health.Copyright © 2020 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.