Jonathan Schaefer
University of Minnesota
“Approaching the Unanswerable: Using Causally-informative Observational Research to Understand the Relationship between Environmental Exposures and Mental Health”
Mental health problems are highly prevalent and disabling; their onset and severity have also been linked to a variety of environmental factors well within human control. Nevertheless, translating these findings into improvements in population mental health and reductions in health disparities has posed perennial challenges. One significant hurdle is that the gold-standard approach for determining causality—the randomized clinical trial—cannot be ethically used to study the long-term consequences of experiences with putatively “toxic” effects on the brain and behavior. Drawing conclusions from animal research is also challenging, since the non-human analogues of complex psychiatric presentations often differ significantly from their human counterparts. Mental health researchers studying environmental exposures have thus generally had to contend with three possibilities: (1) that the exposure causes mental health problems, (2) that these problems predispose individuals to the exposure, or (3) that the associations between exposure and outcome are driven by other, unmeasured factors. Work that differentiates between these possibilities is needed to guide intervention and policy because if the relationship between an exposure and mental health is largely non-causal, we would expect targeting that exposure to have little positive impact. My program of research addresses this need by using longitudinal and twin methods to answer critical etiological questions regarding specificity, mechanisms, and cause.
Monday, February 20, 2023
3:30pm – 4:30pm
490 Gilmer Academic Commons