Association between immigrant concentration and mental health service utilization in the United States over time: A geospatial big data analysis.

ABSTRACT: Immigrants (foreign-born United States [US] citizens) generally have lower utilization of mental health services compared with US-born counterparts, but extant studies have not investigated the disparities in mental health service utilization within immigrant population nationwide over time. Leveraging mobile phone-based visitation data, we estimated the average mental health utilization in contiguous US census tracts in 2019, 2020, and 2021 by employing two novel outcomes: mental health service visits and visit-to-need ratio (i.e., visits per depression diagnosis). We then investigated the tract-level association between immigration concentration and mental health service utilization outcomes using mixed-effects linear regression models that accounted for spatial lag effects, time effects

SUBMITTER: Jing F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10527759 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature