Baranyi, G, Cherrie, M., Curtis, S., Dibben, C., Pearce, J. (2020) 17 August 2020. Impact Case Study [SLS]

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Research Summary

This study examines how local crime is associated with newly prescribed psychotropic medications in a large longitudinal sample of Scottish adults. It explores how area-level socioeconomic disadvantage changes this relationship and tests whether different types of psychiatric conditions were more sensitive to varying crime levels.

Data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, a 5.3% sample of the population, were linked with police-recorded crime in 2011 for residential locality and with psychotropic medications from 2009 to 2014, extracted from the prescription data set of National Health Service Scotland. After excluding individuals with ongoing medication, new (or restarting) prescriptions for 3 main types of psychotropic drugs: antidepressants, antipsychotics and anxiolytics were linked to the SLS members in the study (129, 945 adults) and the sample was followed for 5.5 years.

In the main analyses, 3 models were presented for the 3 medication groups with crime as the main predictor of interest. Model 1 controlled for sex and age; Model 2: individual covariates (ethnicity, social status etc); and Model 3: area level income deprivation.

Download output document: Gergo Baranyi Impact Case Study
Output from project: 2015_015