“People are dying younger than ever before, and it’s not because of COVID,” he said. Fortuna, along with Robert Walker and Andrew Bohm, presented a symposium titled Addressing Health Disparities in Life Expectancy Through Community-Engaged Research Thursday at Boston College. The event was sponsored by the School of Social Work of P.S. and the Health and Mental Health Clinic. The three created Collaborative Design For Recovery and Health — a platform where patients and scientists around the world can share research to combat premature mortality rates. The platform’s research has been presented in more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications, in smartphone apps that create a biosensor to diagnose preclinical schizophrenia, in seminars and trainings, and has received numerous grants, Fortuna said. According to Fortuna, she and her colleagues are also investigating trauma in people with severe mental illness. Fortuna said the empirical literature fails to explain the role that trauma — acute, chronic or complex — has in early mortality rates. “Ninety percent of people diagnosed with SMI have experienced trauma,” Fortuna said. “It leads to all kinds of health effects, and all the health interventions and programs out there don’t address the trauma.” It is imperative that medical and mental health facilities have new programs and services to provide some type of trauma screening, Fortuna said, in order to have an effective impact on this population. Bohm also spoke about the impact people with SMI can have on their families and how there is not enough support for these family members. Addressing and investigating questions about this type of support is the first step to change in this system, Bohm said. Bohm then explained precision medicine – medicine that is tailored to individual patients. He said the push for precision medicine is an effort to personalize care by taking into account different socio-demographic, environmental and lifestyle factors. “Adjusting someone’s care isn’t necessarily as simple as saying, ‘Oh, you have this diagnosis, here’s your pill,’” she said. “It absolutely provides protection, but it doesn’t necessarily cure that patient — it treats that condition.” More research into precision medicine could have a huge impact on individual patients, Bohm said, as it responds to their specific needs. He said his team is figuring out the best way to deliver this research to patients and providers. The speakers then opened the discussion for questions from the audience. Nancy Fennell, participant and director of the Behavioral Health Clinical Learning Collaborative in New Hampshire, shared how her profession relates to this research. “What I’m really finding, right in our little state of New Hampshire, is how many initiatives are working to develop peer support,” Fennell said. “How in the world can we bring these groups together?” Walker admitted he doesn’t yet have a definitive answer. The separate initiatives are unintended side effects of the new focus on behavioral health, he said, and there hasn’t been much opportunity for coordination, despite growing funding for the field. “What was a ‘behavioral health funding’ need four years ago will now be a ‘behavioral health workforce’ need,” Walker said. Sarah Laterza, a graduate student at BC’s School of Social Work, shared her thoughts on the many facets of social work research. “I originally came to this talk because I wanted to learn more about health disparities in older adults, especially since most of my courses focus on children and families,” Laterza said. “However, what I found most interesting is how this research can be used by so many different professions. It really shows how social work is an interdisciplinary field.”
