Earlier this month, GREMAP students and staff participated in the UM Transdisciplinary Aging Research Day. This event was an opportunity for aging-related T32 trainees (i.e., NIH-funded training grants) to network and learn from each other. Presentations were given by trainees from each of the four aging-related T32 programs at the University of Michigan including Training in the Demography and Economics of Aging, Career Training in the Biology Aging, the Physician Scientist Training in Age-Related Disease, and the Interdisciplinary Research Training on Health and Aging. The keynote was given by Dr. Kenneth Langa, who provided an overview of the Health and Retirement study including future directions in cognitive aging research.

GREMAP team members Kallisse Dent, a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology, and Dr. Linh Dang, a recent graduate of the Epidemiology doctoral program, presented their work in the poster session as part of the Interdisciplinary Research Training on Health and Aging program. Overall, this event was a great opportunity to get to connect with other T32 trainees and engage with diverse and interdisciplinary aging research!

Left: Viktoryia Kalesnikava pictured at the poster session. Right: Kallisse Dent (second from the right) and Linh Dang (far right) with fellow T32 trainees.

For those who were unable to attend the “Mind Matters: Suicide Risk During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period” webinar this September, the recording has been made publicly available on YouTube. Please find the link here.

The organizing team also provided several relevant resources on suicide prevention, perinatal health and wellbeing, and other mental health topics that were shared during the webinar. Please find the the resources listed below:

• The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has many resources to learn more about suicide and suicide prevention: https://afsp.org/risk-factors-protective-factors-and-warning-signs/
• For a list of resources related to a variety of mental health topics, including suicide prevention, please visit the U-M Department of Psychiatry Mental Health Resource List: https://michmed.org/resources
• The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free and confidential. Text or Call 24/7: 1-833-TLC-MAMA
• Postpartum Support International (PSI) provides support in the form of support groups, peer mentoring, education, and their free helpline. Visit their website at https://www.postpartum.net or call their helpline at 1-800-944-4773
• Michigan Medicine’s Psychiatry Emergency Services free crisis line is available 24/7. Call 734-936-5900 or 734-996-4747
• U-M’s Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Clinic can be reached at 734-764-0231. Call for information or to schedule an evaluation.
• MC3 Perinatal provides a variety of resources for parents and health care providers. Visit their website at https://www.mc3michigan.org or call 844-828-9304

We are very excited to share that Dr. Mezuk and Dr. Kara Zivin will be presenting at an upcoming webinar titled “Mind Matters: Suicide Risk During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period”, co-hosted by the UM Department of Psychiatry, Zero to Thrive, and Perinatal Mental Health and Services and Policy program. This conversation will build off the findings from our paper on suicide during the perinatal period, recently published in JAMA Network Open. 

This webinar will be held virtually on Zoom on Tuesday, September 24th from 7:00-8:30 pm EST. Please find the registration link and additional details here.

We are very excited to announce that Linh has successfully defended her dissertation! Her dissertation is entitled Work Expectations and Psychological Distress Among American and South Korean Older Adults: Exploring the Contextual Roles of Gender, Family, and the Great Recession. Congratulations again to Dr. Dang!

GREMAP out to a celebratory lunch for Linh

We are excited to announce that GREMAP student Alyson Miller will be moving on from GREMAP to pursue a MPH degree at the University of Manchester! Alyson graduated this spring with a BS in Public Health Sciences from the UM School of Public Health.

Alyson has been working with us for the past two years during her undergraduate studies and supported both the ATLAS and DMH projects. She was a core part of the team that worked on our paper examining suicide during the perinatal period, which was recently published in JAMA Network Open.

It has been a pleasure having Alyson work with us in the lab, we wish you all the best in the UK!

We are happy to announce that the ATLAS project team has recently published a paper on suicide during the perinatal period in JAMA Network Open! This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to examine circumstances associated with suicide mortality among women in the perinatal period (i.e., pregnant at time of death or pregnant within a year before death). Overall, our findings highlight that mental health, substance use, and intimate partner problems are key precipitating circumstances for suicides among pregnant and postpartum women. We also conducted a detailed qualitative analysis that provides further context to these findings, including that additional factors such as postpartum depression, miscarriage, and abortion were salient experiences for these women.

We are very excited to share this work with a broader audience! This analysis was also highlighted in a recent news article by the UM Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, which you can read here.

This month, Dr. Mezuk hosted a workshop with scholars from the Michigan Integrative Well-being and Inequality (MIWI) Training Program at the Universita di Bologna entitled “Building Bridges in Integrative Health Research.” The workshop focused on approaches for building and methods for measuring connections between variables, between concepts, and between people.

Above: The flyer (left) and objectives & agenda (right) for the workshop. Below: Dr. Mezuk and MIWI scholars in Bologna!

GREMAP research scientist Alejandro Rodríguez-Putnam recently presented at the VI Puerto Rican Conference on Public Health in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This conference, which drew participants from 17 different countries, represents a concerted effort among social, community, and academic entities to spur action and foster a robust Public Health culture in Puerto Rico.

At the conference, which took place on May 2nd and 3rd, Alejandro moderated and presented at the Mental Health Promotion session on the preliminary results of his study, “Exploring Social, Economic, and Environmental Correlates of Suicide in Puerto Rico, 2017-2021,” as part of the larger ATLAS project. Additionally, Alejandro delved into pressing public health concerns through his participation in the special panel “Investigation of Mortality Associated with Hurricane Maria’s Impact on Puerto Rico”.

To learn more about the conference or Alejandro’s work, please get in touch with him at arputnam@umich.edu. Great work, Alejandro!