When crime hits communities: A story of fear and depression in Mexico

Esther Heesemann and Slava Yakubenko

VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Illegal activities harm individuals and society as a whole. Besides the physical harm and immediate wealth loss, crime can entail more subtle, long-lasting consequences, namely, impaired mental health. This article presents significant evidence that the surge of crime rates in Mexico contributed to higher incidence of major depressive disorder in the population. Focusing on Mexico allows us to analyse how a sudden, arguable exogenous shock on overall crime rates in the 2000s, namely the initiation of the war on drugs, affects the incidence of depression. We take advantage of the micro-level panel data to establish several channels through which crime provokes depression of victims and their surrounding: (1) acute stress from being the victim; (2) long-term stress due to low safety perception; (3) destruction of social capital in communities exposed to high crime rates. These findings document less immediate consequences of conflict and have to be accounted for designing an efficient mental health policy.

Keywords: depression; crime; mental health; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I10 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203612/1/VfS-2019-pid-28086.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:vfsc19:203612

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().