Geospatial Insights into Youth Mental Health

Hosted by: Dr. Aaron Hipp

Summary: Youth mental disorders and suicide are an acute public health crisis. Yet, mental health research primarily focuses on clinical settings and qualitative methods that are local in scale or limited to the most severe outcomes (e.g., suicide). Identifying geographic hotspots in which adolescents are at greater risk for adverse mental health outcomes is a complex issue involving a combination of social, environmental, and/or economic variables related to spatial location. In this forum, we will leverage recent advances in spatial analytics paired with longitudinal mental health data from state-based surveillance systems and novel real-time digital data sources to tease apart these dynamic and complex interactions.

About the speaker: Dr. Maggie Sugg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Planning at Appalachian State University. Her research focuses on the spatiotemporal patterns of environmental health illnesses and how these patterns relate to environmental, socioeconomic, and climatic determinants. Dr. Sugg has 70 publications on the intersection of geography, climate, and public health. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Environmental Protection Agency’s STAR fellowship in Public Health and funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP).

Recording: https://youtu.be/4kKW3OknaN8