CAREER: The Geography of Mental Health: Understanding contextual, compositional, and external stressors.

This project advances the understanding of the complex relationship between mental health and geography across an array of mental health outcomes ranging from less severe (e.g., depression, crisis help-seeking behaviors) to more severe (e.g., suicide). The findings of this research are potentially transformative for both mental health and geographical research because it uses geographic methods to identify populations with elevated mental health risks and creates a conceptual framework for environmental and social drivers of patterns in mental health outcomes. On a more fundamental level, this project raises awareness of the impact of COVID-19 and environmental stressors on mental health and the populations at risk for adverse mental health consequences. The model and research approach developed in this project are likely to be generally useful for evaluating mental health stressors in numerous locations. The project's educational activities target first-generation college students and K-12 educators who use instructional technology.

Mental disorders and suicide are an acute public health crisis. There is a critical need to understand the myriad of mental health disorders and implement public health interventions at multiple levels. This study examines mental health across contexts using a geographic lens to describe a complex set of interacting factors that produce adverse outcomes. More specifically, this project will address the following research questions: (1) What are the spatial and temporal patterns of mental health outcomes (e.g., suicide, self-harm, depression, anxiety, etc.)? (2) What are the underlying contextual factors (e.g., community-level poverty, racial segregation) and compositional (e.g., gender, age, veteran status, lethal means) that influence these outcomes? (3) What are external stressors (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters) that lead to increased mental health outcomes? The methodology leverages multiple population-based datasets and uses methods that analyze the external causes of different mental health outcomes. This project's findings will be enhanced through collaboration with colleagues and students in psychology, ensuring that the information derived from this project is put into practice rapidly, accurately, and effectively.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.