Rules vs. Discretion: Treatment of Mental Illness in U.S. Adolescents

Emily Cuddy and Janet Currie

No 27890, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many mental health disorders start in adolescence and appropriate initial treatment may improve trajectories. But what is appropriate treatment? We use a large national database of insurance claims to examine the impact of initial mental health treatment on the outcomes of adolescent children over the next two years, where treatment is either consistent with FDA guidelines, consistent with looser guidelines published by professional societies (“grey-area” prescribing), or inconsistent with any guidelines (“red-flag” prescribing). We find that red-flag prescribing increases self-harm, use of emergency rooms, and health care costs, suggesting that treatment guidelines effectively scale up good treatment in practice.

JEL-codes: I1 I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: CH EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27890.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Rules vs. Discretion: Treatment of Mental Illness in U.S. Adolescents (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27890

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27890

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().