School closures and parental mental health

Schools support families not only through education but also by facilitating daily routines, childcare, and social supports. Disruptions to schooling may therefore have broader effects on family well-being, including parental mental health. We study how school closures affected parental initiation of antidepressant use, as a proxy for mental healthcare needs, using national commercial claims data and a difference-in-differences design that exploits geographic variation in physical school access during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though antidepressant use declined during the pandemic overall, we find that in zip codes with a high level of school closures, the decline in antidepressant use was approximately 3.8% smaller for both mothers and fathers relative to zip codes that remained largely open during the early months of the pandemic. These effects persisted through 2021, even after in-person instruction resumed. Mothers across most racial groups are affected by specific school-level closures (elementary, middle, and high), while for fathers, there are only small detectable increases with respect to elementary schools. These findings highlight the role of schools in buffering household stress and supporting mental health, and contribute to a broader economics literature that leverages the pandemic as a natural experiment to better understand how institutional disruptions impact health outcomes.