Interventions to alleviate mental health care access disparities can prevent unnecessary death and suffering, a team of researchers has said in an article to be published soon in PNAS next week.
Titled “Differential Spatial-Social Accessiblity to Mental Health Care and Suicide,” the study comes amid historically high suicide rates and mental health care provider shortages in the health care settings.
The research by Daniel Tadmon and Peter S Bearman find that in the United States improved access to mental health care is associated with reductions in suicide risk.
To enable this research, Tadmon and Bearman developed new methods of measuring access with greater granularity than previously possible.
To start, they precisely located all psychiatrists and therapists in the United States, creating a comprehensive, accurate provider mapping for the first time. For each census tract, roughly equivalent to a neighborhood in size, they calculated residents’ access to care by incorporating service demand, competition, and transportation options.
Next, they compared this score to the average suicide rate at the county level. Higher scores, which indicated shorter travel times to more providers who are less saturated by demand, were strongly associated with reduced suicide risk. This effect persisted when controlling for other key factors associated with suicide, including race, divorce, and gun shop prevalence, said the study.