Antidepressant use spikes among student school shooting survivors

The children who experience a school shooting but live to see their parents and friends again are often called survivors. But by at least one measure of mental health, they too are among a gunman’s victims, new research finds.

In the two years after a fatal school shooting, the rate at which antidepressants were prescribed to children and teens rose by 21% within a tight ring around the affected school.

The increase in antidepressants prescribed to kids grew more — to nearly 25% — three years after a school shooting, suggesting that survivors’ depression lingers long after the incident has begun to fade from a community’s memory.

This first-ever effort to measure the mental health consequences of school shootings in the U.S. was reported Monday in a working paper published by the National Bureau for Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. School shootings reached an all-time high of 17 in 2018, and as the number of incidents has mounted, so too has the number of students directly affected by them.

Since the April 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, a person wielding a gun has opened fire on school grounds during the school day no fewer than 234 times. More than 240,000 students attending those primary and secondary schools at the time of these incidents came away with no physical injuries.

Psychological injuries are another matter. In March, for instance, two students who survived the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., took their own lives.

“School shootings represent a tiny fraction of gun deaths in America,” said Stanford University health economist Maya Rossin-Slater, the paper’s lead author. “But they are uniquely potentially traumatizing, and may have these much larger indirect costs — depression, delayed grief, kids not able to move on and be successful in their lives.”

Parents, teachers and those who tend to the health of children need better guidance on which students may need the most support in the wake of a school shooting, and for how long, she said.

In a bid to capture how a community’s mental health is affected by gunfire at school, Rossin-Slater and a team of fellow economists from Stanford and Northwestern University focused on 44 school shootings that occurred between January 2008 and April 2013.

In 10 of the incidents, no one was killed or injured; when there were casualties, two or three deaths or injuries was the norm. (The 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 26 were killed and two injured, was by far the most lethal incident included in the study.)