Valley volunteers sought for mental health study

BOARDMAN — The common understanding is that 1 in 5 people struggles with mental health or addiction, but researchers at The Ohio State University say the reality is much more stark.

“The truth is that five out of five people are actually struggling because they care about someone who is struggling with mental health or addiction,” said Scott Langenecker, professor and vice chair for research at OSU. “Everybody knows somebody who is affected.”

Langenecker is one of the principal investigators leading the State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience (SOAR) study, a series of studies into the root causes and risk factors of mental illness and addiction, supported by $20 million from the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and led by OSU’s College of Medicine and Wexner Medical Center.

The longitudinal study that seeks to follow families and individuals over a period of several years is recruiting participants in Boardman and surrounding communities in Northeast Ohio.

Langenecker said the project is all about identifying how people cope with struggles and learning from it to help others do better.

Langenecker said one of the objectives of SOAR is trying to change the narrative around helping people overcome their struggles because the default setting of humans is resilience.

“Among people who experience trauma and adversity, about five or six out of 10 will develop meaningful skills to cope, about three out of 10 will have a lasting negative impact, and one out of 10 will struggle a lot,” he said. “Why should we care? Because those four in 10 could move to a higher level of functioning and better quality of life with the right support and services. It’s not about who you are, it’s about opportunity.”

WHAT THE STUDY DOES

Behind St. Elizabeth Boardman Hospital is a large trailer. Inside is a giant MRI machine and some computers. The machine is part of the brain health study, which is one of two primary components of the SOAR study.

The first part has mostly been completed — a wellness discovery survey of 15,000 Ohioans.

“That’s already finished, but we’re going to continue to collect more responses from every county. So in Northeast Ohio that means from Sandusky to Martins Ferry, or about 25 to 30% of that sample,” Langenecker said.

Langenecker said the survey covers five basic parts:

* Who are you, where are you from, what are your basic demographics?

* What sort of early life experiences have you had, bad or good?

* What sort of skills have you developed in terms of resilience?

* What sort of community, family and other support do you have?

* How is your mental health?

The second component, now underway at St. Elizabeth Boardman Hospital through the end of April, is a brain health study. In all SOAR hopes to recruit about 1,200 families and is seeking 170 to 180 to sign up in Boardman.

That portion includes not just questionnaires but biological tests, looking at blood stress markers, genetics, structure and function of the brain, and day-to-day questions about how people are living their lives.

“These two studies interact and create information from a family-embedded multi-generational perspective about what things move people toward wellness and toward illness,” Langenecker said.

The brain health study includes brain measurements, performance measurements, blood data, using an MRI, EEG, and measurements of height, weight, lipids, cholesterol, neuropsychological assessments, mental flexibility and knowledge tests, and diagnostics.

The study also asks participants to take daily “ecological momentary assessments” — in-the-moment questions such as how are you? What are you doing? Who are you hanging out with? What coping skills are you using if things are difficult? or if things are great, why are they great?

Participants take the assessment for about a minute, four to five times a day for a month.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN

Langenecker said part of SOAR is about rebuilding some of the trust scientists seem to have lost with the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The point of SOAR is to establish a relationship, or to strengthen a relationship, between scientists and the communities who can benefit from science,” he said.

“In the behavioral health and addiction space, when there’s tremendous need, our role is to listen and learn about stories and pathways to resilience, where people have struggled or not, and have moved to a place of wellness, and how they got there.”

He said the study is based on the understanding that people are experts on their own lives and the authors of their own stories.

“It’s about recognition of two things: one, that people and communities and families are already doing a tremendous amount of work towards creating better mental health and reducing addiction and overdose, and two, we want to validate and acknowledge that effort and validate and acknowledge that we need to do more,” he said.

Langenecker said the study is not about telling people what to do to be healthier, but learning what people are doing to help themselves and providing a statewide platform for that knowledge and insight to be shared.

“We are agnostic to what works, we want to learn what works and find ways to scale it up, so that other communities and other people can sort it out and make choices about pathways to wellness,” he said. “So if something really cool is going on in Summit or Mahoning, we want to know that, so that then maybe people in Coshocton or Gallia county want to learn from that.”

Langenecker said the study will focus on everything from people’s own coping skills to their environments, and what they have access to, in terms of educational and social resources, food, faith communities, addiction support services, counseling, and nearly every other variable that can affect well-being and resilience.

“Because Ohio is such a neat state, we can try to understand what things might be different in a rural setting versus an urban setting that drive people toward risk or resilience,” he said. “For example, food deserts actually exist in both spaces and so families’ access to high-quality food may be a shared and modifiable risk factor in both settings.”

Likewise, he said, with differences in educational systems.

“In urban settings, teachers usually are a part of a complex network of wellness for the development of children, whereas in rural settings, schools may be the only place where kids get access to those resources for development and wellness,” he said.

“This study is about standing back and saying we don’t actually know what system works best. And maybe realizing that an urban system in a rural setting might be a really dumb idea because it’s really expensive, and a rural system in an urban area might be a dumb idea because if we aggregate people together we can provide more services.”

Overall, Langenecker said, the study is about letting Ohioans show and tell researchers what Ohioans need broadly and locally.

“The question here really is about how do we create a study that makes everyone in Ohio feel like: ‘This is a study that will benefit me and my family?’”

For more information or to register for the SOAR study, visit https://soarstudies.org/.