Social inequalities in new antidepressant treatment: a study at the individual and neighborhood levels

Environmental and individual characteristics associated with depressive disorders and mental health care use

“…However, using comparable administrative health care reimbursement data, a study conducted in another French city found more heterogeneity between neighborhoods than in our own study [14]. Potential explanations of this discrepancy include the different geographic location, the much larger (administrative based) sample of this other study, and the fact that this previous study did not adjust for the depression status or various individual sociodemographic variables.…”

“…Few studies [14,15] have examined the relationship between residential environments and antidepressant consumption. In a Swedish study, one of the weakest associations reported between neighborhood deprivation and psychiatric prescription was for antidepressants [15].…”

“…Organizational factors, such as the rate of reimbursement of psychotherapies or gatekeeping policies, were also found to influence mental health service use [11,12]. However, although there is an unequal geographical distribution of mental health professionals (the department of Paris had a density of 72.8 psychiatrists for 100,000 inhabitants in 2014, as compared with 17.5 in the poorer, immediately adjacent county of Seine Saint Denis [13]), much less is known about environmental influences on mental health services use [9,14,15].…”

Intérêt des données de remboursement de l’assurance-maladie pour l’étude des disparités territoriales de la prévalence de l’asthme : une étude en Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur

“…Pour chaque bénéficiaire, les variables suivantes étaient disponibles : sexe, âge, couverture maladie universelle complémentaire (CMUC) (oui/non) et commune de domicile. La CMUC, attribuée sous conditions de ressources, est un marqueur d'un faible niveau de revenu [22].…”

Social Inequalities in Early Antidepressant Discontinuation

“…Although compelling evidence indicates that low socioeconomic status (SES) increases the duration of new episodes of major depression (11), several studies have shown the duration of antidepressant treatment to be shorter among people of low SES (6)(7)(8)12,13). This fact suggests that the inverse-care law-that is, "the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served" (14,15)-applies to continuation of antidepressant treatment, especially among highly disadvantaged populations.…”