Trauma-Focused Therapy Session Spacing Compression and Mental Health Relapse in Rwandan District Clinics: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Scheduling Interval Thresholds

District clinics in Rwanda deliver trauma-focused therapy under scheduling rules that compress session intervals once a fixed caseload threshold is crossed, yet the effect of that compression on relapse is unknown. the present analysis treats the scheduling threshold as a regression discontinuity and estimates the local average treatment effect of interval compression on relapse risk using a design that exploits the discontinuity in session spacing at the caseload cut-off. The analysis is framed as a proposed application of the regression discontinuity design to routine clinic scheduling data, not as an executed empirical study. The estimand is the jump in twelve-month relapse probability at the threshold, identified under the assumption that clinic caseloads are continuous through the cut-off. The paper specifies the running variable, the cut-off, the bandwidth, the local linear estimator, and the placebo and manipulation checks that would license a causal interpretation. It also derives the minimum detectable effect for plausible clinic sample sizes and shows how the design distinguishes scheduling compression from confounding by clinic quality and patient severity. The contribution is a pre-specified identification strategy that converts a routine administrative rule into a credible quasi-experiment, together with a statement of the conditions under which the resulting estimate would and would not support a policy of interval protection for trauma-focused therapy in Rwandan district clinics.