About This Project

Those suffering with serious mental illness often live in places with health inequities, barriers to care, and stressful conditions. A staggering amount of data are publicly available that are relevant to understanding a patient’s life outside the clinic and formulating informed interventions. The proposed project

will combine these scattered resources into a web-based interface for clinicians and evaluate changes in geography-informed treatment planning.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Studies have confirmed the intuitive notion that where one lives impacts one's mental health. Geographers and data scientists demonstrate this with sophisticated analyses using focused data sets. But, these data, even when publicly available, are often scattered in different sources, and in formats that are useless to the average clinician or layperson. There is a need for tools that integrate these data into a format intuitively useful for clinicians.

What is the significance of this project?

Those suffering with serious mental illness not only bear more than their share of burden from their living contexts, but also often suffer from deficits in cognition and executive functioning that amplify the impact of this burden.

To fully understand the effects of living environments on mental health
and design informed treatment interventions, we need to be able to
compile available data and make it usable for clinicians.

What are the goals of the project?

The immediate goal of the project is to roll it out into the hand of clinicians seeing patients. This will require a more substantive hosting service that the one on which the project was developed. Funding of this project would allow it to be deployed onto a commercially hosted server that could handle the additional traffic load.