Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
Year: 2021
DOI:
Testing the Contradictive Effect of Nationalism on Mental Health from Country-Level Observations
Liu Yinghao, Liu Yingxu
ABSTRACT:
Nationalism has led to various adverse outcomes globally during the coronavirus pandemic. This paper derived country-level data from the World Value Survey (2017–2020) and the Global Health Data Exchange (2019) to investigate the effect of nationalism on the prevalence of mental health problems, including major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder. To address the causal relationship between nationalism and mental health outcomes, we use constitutional protection to non-citizens as an instrumental variable. Our study shows that nationalism, interacting with economic development is positively associated with a higher prevalence of anxiety disorder within a country. After applying the instrumental variable for our examination, we found the previous negative association of nationalism and mental health problem turned positive, suggesting that nationalism could be responsible for a higher prevalence of mental health problems within the country.
keywords: nationalism; depressive disorder; anxiety disorder; economic development; constitutional protects.