I'm June Gruber, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director of this Mental Health Experts series. I'm excited to be here today with Dr. April Thames an Associate Professor and Clinical Neuropsychologist in the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Southern California. Thanks for being here today. Thank you for having me. I was wondering April if you could start by just saying a little bit about the kind of mental health work and research that you're doing. Sure. My work is really largely focused on outcomes and I have more recently been interested in aging outcomes for both cognitive and mental health. Trying to bridge the relationship between the social contexts where things are happening in the social environment and how that interacts with biological processes to influence these various outcomes. In more recently, I've been doing work around socioeconomic disadvantage as well as discrimination and racism and looking at how those social factors have an influence on both cognitive and mental health. How did you first get started doing this just incredibly important line of work that you described? Well, it was not a clear cut journey. I first started having an interest in brain and behavior relationships. That's what pushed me down the Clinical Neuropsychology track, and recognizing how much that disease as well as mental health, they really go hand in hand, and cognitive processes and how those may deteriorate as a function of disease. I started there and then recognize that many of the, I was studying in HIV infected population, many of the people who would come to our research studies had a number of issues going on. It was challenging because I was interested at the time in how does HIV influenced cognitive and mental health outcomes. But then realizing that that was too simplistic of a framework and too simplistic of a question because these people had these very rich life histories of stigma, social isolation, socioeconomic disadvantage, access to health care. There were all of these social issues that seemed to really play more of an important role on somebody's cognitive or mental health trajectory. That's when I started shifting into looking at some of these more, if you will, psycho-social factors. Because I, from way back in the day, had always an interest in stereotyping, I was actually trained initially by a social psychologist. Learning about stereotype threat and the idea of threats being in the air. It really started churning my wheels later down the line when I started thinking, "Wow, how could this apply to the work that I'm doing now?" Which led me down the path into becoming really interested in issues of racism and discrimination particularly because most of our study participants are African-American. That's a very salient factor. Part of the identity and thinking of it as a stressor, a unique one, not one that in the general form of how we think about stress, but really thinking about racism and the potential for someone to judge you or to stigmatize you or discriminate because of that folded into my work later down the line. Along the way in pursuing this work because you're staying with groups of individuals who've gone through a lot of rich and challenging life histories and experiences, you're saying discrimination and isolation, what did you notice as some of your own frustrations or challenges in doing this work as well as some successes that you've been able to savor along the way? Sure. There have been a lot of frustrations. We could go on for days about that. But I would say largely the frustration was trying to have a framework to understand all these complex issues. There have been theoretical models for pause, particularly around social determinants of health and how that influences outcomes. I use that framework to think about the work that I do. But it's even more complex than that because of the interactions between all of these variables. Then it gets even more complicated when you start thinking about people who have intersecting identities that where certain aspects of their identity may be salient in one context, but then it changes. In terms of even the social threats tied to each type of Identity, largely in the population I've seen, racial identity, sexual identity, those are factors that can intersect at various moments. I think one of the initial frustrations was just feeling too overwhelmed. Like this is too much, I don't know where to start, I just wanted to understand about brain and behavior, and I wanted it to be very simple science, and it became larger than that. Trying to tackle that, I would say, has been a frustration but also a success. I think we are moving in the direction of recognizing how complex these issues are. A second, I would say frustration, if you will, or barrier, initially, to my work was that racism and discrimination, although it's been talked about in its connections to health, I think many people when I would give talks or presentations, I don't really think it hit home enough of how different it really is. I remember trying to talk about these issues, and then someone would raise their hand in the audience and say, "Well, but these people also have this, and this, and this going on, so how do you really know that this is about racism and discrimination?" It forced me to go beyond the anecdotal. I know that this is a very unique stressor, and very tied to social threat, and to actually study it, and to really force myself to come out with data to have evidence for something that I've known for a long time. I would say that both instances have been both frustrations but also successes. What do you see as the most important future directions of the field looking ahead? I think we need to focus on more resiliency factors. I know we don't have a really unified definition for why that is, but I do. One of my concerns is someone who does study "under represented are under-resourced populations" is that sometimes the language used in interpretations, and I've been guilty of this too, tends to pathologize these groups. Considering these groups as risk factors or being part of this group as a risk factor. I think we have to be really careful with how we talk about that and to really start looking at the strengths and the positive aspects. Despite all of these adversities, what are some of the key elements that keep people from actually having adverse outcomes of what we would expect? I'm hoping the work goes in that direction to focus less on pathology, more on strengths because I think ultimately those will be helpful for interventions moving forward with how to address these various issues. That for the most part, a lot of these social issues are not going to go away. People will live in adverse conditions, and we can't unfortunately fix that, but we can optimize mental health by really understanding what is critical for surviving through these various life adversities. Along these lines, and my last question for you is, what advice would you have for people watching this interview today? Maybe the students or the public who are interested in learning more about maybe getting engaged in the field? I would say, for students, I think this is the time when the intersection of social justice issues and health is at its peak. I would encourage just reading whatever they can about the topics. For the public, I think the awareness piece is critical and I would hope that other academics, such as myself continue not just to do the work, but to really put it in platforms where the public gets to see it. Because often we have so much knowledge that gets locked up in the ivory tower, if you will, because we're publishing in journals that mostly our own peers are reading. To encourage outlets that actually the public will be aware of, I think that's one thing that I'm forcing myself to do with my work, and I would hope other academics do. With students, I think just linking to opportunities that will allow them to study these complex issues would be very helpful in the future. Thank you so much for sticking that promise, really inspiring. Great. Well, thank you.
