Prof. Sanjay Srivastava’s collaborative NIH-funded research on mental health and social media are featured in this quarter’s CAScade magazine:

Srivastava studies how personality affects and is affected by the social environment. He said outcomes of the project could include information about how mental health indicators vary over time and between communities and regions; how major events such as disasters and mass shootings affect community mental health; and how social media might be used for individual-level screening and diagnosis.

“There are mental health variables that are common experience—depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress,” Srivastava said. “We’re interested in individuals but also, at a more collective level, communities. What kind of difficulties are they having, and can we use that to do better health research and policies?”