CHP Seminar - Juan Felipe Rincón Mejía

Seminar title: Political Orientation and Health in Brazil: Evidence from an Interrupted Time Series Analysis of Suicide Trends.

Overview: Juan Felipe Rincón Mejía is a doctoral candidate in Public Health at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, and currently undertaking a research stay at the University of Melbourne. His doctoral research investigates whether political orientation at the territorial level is associated with changes in population health indicators in Brazil following the 2018 presidential election. In this seminar, Juan Felipe will present part of his PhD study, which focuses on suicide rates as a key mental health outcome and examines whether temporal trends differed across microregions with different voting profiles. Using a balanced panel of Brazilian microregions from 2014 to 2022, the analysis applies panel interrupted time series models with fixed effects to estimate overall temporal trends and potential structural changes after the 2018 election period. Additional models explore heterogeneity according to the 2018 presidential voting pattern and include robustness analyses using alternative specifications. The research aims to contribute to the growing literature on the relationship between political environments and health outcomes by providing empirical evidence from a large middle-income democracy during a period of political polarization and significant public health challenges.