Kavanaugh hearings, confirmation led to spike in poor mental health for women
August 21, 2023 - Carly Bowling
The 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings held for Brett Kavanaugh may have caused the equivalent of an additional 26 million poor mental health days for adult women in the United States, according to a new paper from researchers at The University of New Mexico, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine.
The paper, titled “The relationship between mental health and public attention to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation,” studies the association between exposure to coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, including testimony by Christine Blasey Ford, and mental health outcomes for adult women in the U.S. and the financial implications of those outcomes across society.
“The cost estimates in this paper only account for a portion of the total societal costs associated with these additional poor mental health days,” Colin Sleeper, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics and lead author, said. We hope this work will be a great starting point for further examining the societal costs of population-level mental health.”
Women experienced an average of .17 additional poor mental health days, or about four hours, in 2018 from Sept. 13 to Oct. 13, which amounts to an average of 26 million additional days women in the U.S. spent experiencing poor mental health, according to the paper. Researchers found a significant spike in Google Trends data for “sexual assault” during the same 30-day period.
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