Essays on the economics of mental health and social interactions

This dissertation investigates questions on mental health, suicide and social networks. Chapter 1 focuses on the effect of increased mental health coverage on suicide. In the 1990s and early 2000s a number of states passed laws requiring mental health benefits to be included in health insurance coverage. The variation in the strength and enactment date of the laws provides an opportunity to measure the impact of increasing access to mental health care on mental health outcomes, as evidenced by state suicide rates. In contrast with previous research, results show that when states enact laws requiring insurance coverage to include mental health benefits at parity with physical health benefits, the suicide rate decreases significantly by five percent. The findings are robust to a number of specifications and falsification tests.;The second chapter looks at the relationship between guns and suicide. A popular proxy for gun ownership is the fraction of suicides from firearms. With the preferred gun proxy being firearm suicide, accurately identifying the causal effect of guns on suicide has proved difficult. This paper uses firearm background checks as a proxy for gun ownership and identifies the effect of guns on suicide. The results from panel data regressions show that when states experience an increase in firearm background checks, firearm suicide rates increase, nonfirearm suicide rates decrease and the overall suicide rate is unchanged. In order to alleviate the endogeneity that comes from suicidal individuals purchasing a gun in order to commit suicide, youth suicide is analyzed and yield the same conclusions. The results suggest that efforts to reduce suicide should focus less on whether individuals have access to a particular method of suicide and more on improvements in mental health.;The third chapter examines the implications of incorporating altruism into networks. When players act altruistically, the number of possible efficient graphs increases. In a perfectly altruistic network, the efficient networks will always be stable, although increasing altruism does not monotonically decrease the tension between stable and efficient networks. These results are shown in detail using a four-player network, however the main results hold for a network of any size.