Ensaios em saúde mental na perspectiva econômica : um estudo de modelos teóricos e análises empíricas

Abstract

Mental disorders impose significant and growing social and economic costs around the world. Despite this, their investigation by economics researchers is still insufficient. To fill this gap, this thesis, made up of three essays, seeks to investigate mental health from an economic perspective, integrating bibliometric evidence, theoretical foundations and empirical analysis. The first chapter presents an overview of scientific production on the themes of mental health and addiction in the field of economics. A bibliometric review was conducted using data extracted from the Web of Science platform. The investigation included both performance indicators and science mapping. The results indicated that the topic has still received limited attention from economics researchers, which can be attributed, in part, to the fragmented scientific community. The second chapter presents Grossman's (1972) model or health production model, emphasizing the role of schooling; it also presents an extension as proposed by Jacobson (2000), which makes it possible to analyze the production of health by the family nucleus. It is argued that both models can be used to study the demand for mental health. Finally, the third chapter consists of an empirical exercise aimed at investigating the effect of different levels of maternal schooling on the presence and severity of children's depressive symptoms in the Brazilian context. Using data from the 2019 National School Health Survey (PeNSE) and estimating an Ordered Probit model, the results point to a modest and not always positive effect of the mother's schooling on her children's depressive symptoms, which suggests that policies aimed at improving the mental health of adolescents through female schooling may be limited if they are focused exclusively on the number of years of study, to the detriment of the quality of the education received. Thus, the thesis contributes to the literature on mental health economics by combining different methodological approaches to map the state of knowledge, propose a theoretical framework for analysis and offer unprecedented empirical evidence for the Brazilian case.