March 2024

ISSUE V

ALACRITY eSToRY Center Annual Meeting

This summer, the ALACRITY eSToRY Center will host its third annual meeting in-person at the Cambridge Public Library. Please keep an eye out for the official invitation!!

CHA poster session

The Health Equity Research Lab presented 11 posters at last year’s 15th annual CHA Academic Poster Session. It was a great opportunity to share some of the research projects that are being conducted at the ALACRITY eSToRY Center.

ALACRITY eSToRY R34 Project Updates

Stress and Coping Among High School Students (ALACRITY eSToRY R34 #1)

PI: Dr. Margaret Weiss

We finished recruiting a racially and ethnically diverse sample of youth across the Everett, Malden, Somerville, and Cambridge high schools and have begun analyzing the screening data. Preliminary results demonstrate that racially and ethnically diverse high school students in school and community settings had significantly higher rates of risk of mental illness compared to pre-pandemic studies, with increased rates that match a number of nationally representative studies in the United States. We add to that literature our unique detailed data on symptoms and functioning in an additional manuscript that is currently in progress. The data also demonstrated strong racial and ethnic disparities in access to mental health treatment among those at high risk of mental illness and suicide. These pilot data will be used as preliminary findings that set the groundwork for future studies.

Real-world Effectiveness of Mental Health Interventions for Suicide Prevention in At-Risk Youth (ALACRITY R34 #2)

PI: Dr. Nicholas Carson

We have completed and submitted for peer review a manuscript using “Longitudinal Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimator” (LTMLE) analyses. In this paper, we compared the effectiveness of high versus low frequency outpatient specialist mental health follow-up at preventing suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) in a diverse sample of adolescents and transitional age youth. This study shows that LTMLE is a powerful analytical tool to emulate randomized control trials using observational data, where confounding by severity (i.e. riskier patients receive more treatment) may obscure the true impact of higher intensity treatment on outcomes. Thus, LTMLE may prove to be an increasingly valuable approach for mental health services research in underserved communities. We also finished recruiting participants from a random subsample of the population identified above as having accessed youth specialty mental health services to: a) assess the long-run impact on suicidality of the treatment regimes; and b) examine how unmeasured social determinants of health may have biased causal inferences in EHR data analyses.

Understanding the Role of Trauma Over the Lifecourse in Order to Improve Trauma-Informed Treatment (ALACRITY R34#3)

PI: Dr. Michael Flores

Using a sample from our data warehouse of patients that experienced interpersonal trauma between ages 0-17, we identified childhood-level factors correlated with suicide ideation and attempt in young adulthood. Findings provide insight on childhood factors associated with suicide ideation and attempt in young adulthood that can help inform the allocation of limited resources within safety-net systems and advise the placement of early intervention and prevention services. Recruitment is also underway to follow up with (1) 100 of these individuals, aged 18-25, with a CAT-MH+ (a remote computerized adaptive test for psychopathology screening and self-reported ratings of the patient) psychiatric assessment, and (2) 28 qualitative interviews with a diverse subset of those individuals identified in our sample as having childhood trauma.

UPCOMING TRAINING:

Scaling e-STORY into a National Learning Health Network

Dr. Philip Wang

March 06, 2024, 1:00-2:00 PM EST

Add to Calendar

PAST TRAININGS:

Qualitative data collection: Individual interviews and Focus groups

Dr. Dharma Cortés

Recording | Slide Deck

If you wish to let us know which training you would like to see this year and/or register your interest in future webinars, please click here.

S P O T L I G H T

Awards and Recognitions

Dr. Caryn Rodgers, PhD, one of our ALACRITY pilot project awardees was selected into the highly competitive national program, entitled Transforming Biomedical Research and Academic Faculty through Leadership Opportunities, Training, and Mentorship (TRANSFORM) Program. TRANSFORM is a year-long national leadership development program for mid-career faculty. The goal of TRANSFORM is to transform the biomedical and academic institutions by ensuring that Underrepresented Minority (URM) faculty at the associate professor level acquire the leadership skills and experiences needed to advance successfully into senior faculty and leadership positions at their academic institution and nationally.

Dr. Benjamin Lê Cook, the director of the HERLab, has been promoted to a Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School !!!

Dr. Nicholas Carson and Valeria Chambers were featured in a Science News Explores article, discussing mental health in youth. Valeria Chambers mentioned the Youth Advisory Board as a useful space where teens can share their stories and support each other while informing our work.

Recently Published Papers

Dr. Nicholas J Carson and Dr. Rajendra Aldis published an article in the Winter 2023 edition of Worcester Medicine about “Artificial Intelligence in Mental Healthcare: A Story of Hope and Hazard”. https://issuu.com/wdms/docs/new-digital-true-final-wdms-worcestermedicine-wint/s/42427067

Flores, M. W., Sharp, A., Carson, N. J., & Cook, B. L. (2023). Estimates of Major Depressive Disorder and Treatment Among Adolescents by Race and Ethnicity. JAMA Pediatrics, 177(11), 1215–1223. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.3996

Carson NJ, Yang X, Mullin B, Stettenbauer E, Waddington M, Zhang A, Williams P, Rios Perez GE, Cook BL. Predicting adolescent suicidal behavior following inpatient discharge using structured and unstructured data, Journal of Affective Disorders, Volume 350, 2024, Pages 382-387, ISSN 0165-0327, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.12.059.

Hyatt A, Mullin B, Hasler V, et al. Predictors of relapse and engagement in care one year after ending services in an urban safety net coordinated specialty care program for first episode psychosis. Schizophr Res. 2024;264:140-146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2023.12.022

Cook BL, Rastegar J, Patel N. Social Risk Factors and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care Resource Utilization Among Medicare Advantage Beneficiaries With Psychiatric Disorders. Medical Care Research and Review. 2024;0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10775587231222583

Dacarett-Galeano D, Songtachalert T, Yang CJ, Kaplan A, Zelaya DG, Tran NM, Reisner SL, Dunham E, Mullin BO, Cortés D, Cook BL, Progovac AM (2024) Leveraging the electronic health record to characterize health care utilization and stressors before a suicide attempt among transgender and gender diverse patients, Transgender Health X:X, 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1089/trgh.2023.0054.

Breslow, A. S., Simkovic, S., Franz, P. J., Cavic, E., Liu, Q., Ramsey, N., Alpert, J. E., Cook, B. L., & Gabbay, V. (2023). Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19-Related Stressor Exposure and Adverse Mental Health Outcomes Among Health Care Workers. American Journal of Psychiatry, 180(12), 896–905. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20220180

Progovac, A. M., Mullin, B. O., Yang, X., Kibugi, L. (Trisha), Mwizerwa, D., Hatfield, L. A., Schuster, M. A., McDowell, A., & Cook, B. L. (2023). Despite Higher Rates of Minimally Recommended Depression Treatment, Transgender and Gender Diverse Medicare Beneficiaries with Depression Have Poorer Mental Health Outcomes: Analysis of 2009–2016 Medicare Data. Transgender Health. https://doi.org/10.1089/trgh.2022.0146

Cortés, D.E., Zack, R.M., Odayar, V., Moyer, M., Kumar, A., Maia, J.L., ... Granick, J. (2024). The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Access: Insights from First-Person Accounts in a Safety-Net Health Care System. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 35(1), 37-54. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/919806.

Community Advisory Boards

We are beyond excited that 3 new members joined our Youth Advisory Board recently ! If you know anyone who may be interested in joining, please feel free to circulate this info sheet to your networks or contact us directly.

We continue to work with our community advisory board (CAB), composed of youth and parent/caregivers, to facilitate their feedback on the eSToRY Center’s initiatives. We shared preliminary results of each of the R34 projects, discussed the implications of these findings to community-based interventions, and received their valuable inputs on additional analyses and future projects.

The eSToRY Center will be announcing its fifth pilot project funding opportunity soon in the Spring (by March 15, 2024). Please keep an eye out for the official announcement !!

Dr. Xenia Johnson Bhembe, our Year 3 ALACRITY pilot grant awardee, recently kicked off recruitment for her study, "Parent’s Experience of Racism Influences Follow Through on Mental Health Referrals for Their Children.

Please visit the eSToRY Center website, which provides a public-facing youth-oriented platform where we provide training resources and project updates, and the eSToRY newsletter, disseminating training resources, announcing upcoming events, spotlighting the community advisory board, and providing updates on the R34s to the training distribution list, advisory board members, and other community stakeholders.

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