California's Mental Health Services Act and Mortality Due to Suicide, Homicide, and Acute Effects of Alcohol: A Synthetic Control Application.

ABSTRACT: California's Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) substantially expanded funding of county mental health services through a state tax, and led to broad prevention efforts and intensive services for individuals experiencing serious mental disorders. We estimated the associations between MHSA and mortality due to suicide, homicide, and acute effects of alcohol. Using annual cause-specific mortality data for each US state and the District of Columbia from 1976-2015, we used a generalization of the quasi-experimental synthetic control method to predict California's mortality rate for each outcome in the absence of MHSA using a weighted combination of comparison states. We calculated the association between MHSA and each outcome as the absolute difference and percentage difference between Californ

SUBMITTER: Zimmerman SC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8576368 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature