Our Work

Get to know Catherine Ettman, Ph.D., a member of HBHI’s core faculty and assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her work explores the social and economic forces that shape population mental health and policies that can reduce mental health disparities.

It’s clear that changes in telehealth policy, mobile technology development, and consumer demand have fundamentally reshaped mental health treatment and substance use care in the US and around the world. What does this mean for people’s outcomes, specifically behavioral health care access, quality, and cost?

There is much debate about the effects of pharmaceutical direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) on health care use. In this paper, we inform this debate by examining the effects of DTCA on office visits, as well as treatment courses resulting from those visits, for five common chronic conditions (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, depression, and osteoporosis). In particular, we examine whether office visits result in use of drug therapy and/or continued office visits over time.