Local crime rates and mental health in South Africa

It seems somewhat obvious that being a victim of crime would have a negative impact on mental health. However, does simply living in an area with a higher crime rate also negative affect mental health? That is the research question addressed in this new article by Magda Tsaneva and Lauren-Kate LaPlante (both Clark University), published in the journal Review of Development Economics (open access).

Tsaneva and LaPlante use South African data from the National Income Dynamics Survey (NIDS) between 2008 and 2014, matched with district-level data on crime from the South African Police. The NIDS data includes the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression (CES-D) scale, which Tsaneva and LaPlante use as a measure of mental health. Their sample includes over 13,000 individuals who responded to the survey at least twice (of the four survey waves between 2008 and 2014), which allows them to control for individual fixed effects. Essentially, their analysis looks at how individual depression changes as local crime rates change (measuring crime rates for the previous year), while controlling for the person's age and province-time fixed effects (which should pick up things like common changes in unemployment and economic activity within a province).

Tsaneva and LaPlante find that:

...both property crimes and violent crimes are associated with higher mental distress - an increase of 1SD in property (violent) crime is associated with a 7.2 (8.7) percentage point increase in the probability of depression, significant at the 5% level... Given a baseline proportion of people with depression symptoms of 0.34, these estimates translate to 21.2% and 25.6% change in depression symptoms for a 1SD change in property and violent crime, respectively.

Those are quite sizeable effects. However, they also find that:

...only crime in the most recent year has an effect on mental health....

So, the effect of a change in crime rates is relatively short-lived. And:

...while both men and women experience a rise in depression symptoms associated with a rise in property crime, women experience a much larger effect of violent crime relative to men (1SD increase in violent crime is associated with a 10.2 percentage point increase in depression symptoms for women but only 6.1 percentage point increase for men with effect significant at the 10% level)...

In terms of race, property crime has a small and insignificant effect on the mental health of individuals of African race but a significant and large effect on other racial groups. This is reversed for violent crime, where White and Asian/Indian individuals do not experience a significant deterioration of mental health as violent crime rates rise, while other racial groups do. 

I suspect that the differences probably relate to how likely a person is to feel at risk of crime. Women may feel more at risk of violence (even if, ultimately, men are more likely to be victims of violence). People in higher socioeconomic status groups may have greater fear of property crime, as they likely have more valuable property (and therefore have more to lose, as well as being more likely to be targeted). None of this is terribly surprising, but interesting nonetheless.

However, all of this is based on a self-reported depression scale. I suspect that if there were data on antidepressant prescriptions (and controlling for differential geographical access to prescriptions), you could corroborate this with a more objective measure. In fact, this analysis could easily be done in New Zealand, given data that are available in the IDI. That is perhaps an opportunity for a suitably motivated graduate student in the future.