Dr. Rachel Donnelly will discuss how the policy context of American states can be contextualized as critical determinant of mental health.
Location: LRW 1003 (Community Room). Light refreshments will be served. No registration is needed.
This talk will take place on November 4th from 11:30am-12:30pm ET.
For a virtual link, please register at https://bit.ly/3Tt9uFI
Description:
State policies are salient predictors of health and mortality, yet much remains to be known about how state policy contexts influence mental health outcomes. This talk advances and tests a theoretical framework that situates the state policy context as a critical determinant of mental health, including the stress processes that impact mental health. Using nationally representative survey data from the Household Pulse Survey (2020-2023), we consider how state policy liberalism is associated with probable depression and anxiety in the United States and how state policy liberalism weakens associations between stressors and mental health. This study “structuralizes the stress process” by pointing to the centrality of state policy contexts for mental health outcomes in the United States.
Rachel Donnelly is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on individual and contextual determinants of health across the life course, with an emphasis on stress and state policy contexts. Her research, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, has been published in journals such as Social Forces, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Demography.