My Work at GMHP

In the summer of 2019, I served as a research assistant for the Global Mental Health Program and specifically worked with Dr. Sabrina Hermosilla on two projects. Dr. Hermosilla is an epidemiologist and works as a research scientist with the Global Mental Health Program at Columbia University School of Physician and Surgeons. Her research applies epidemiological principles and methods to explore child and adolescent mental health and psychosocial outcomes in complex emergency settings.

The first project that I worked on investigated what knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors mental health providers have about psychotropic medication for serious mental illness and its implications on prescribing practices in mental health treatment. For this project, I was highly involved in collecting background information on psychotropic medication (MeSH terms and codes, finding the WHO essential medications, finding which years they were added to the WHO essential medication list, making in-depth tables about each psychotropic medication, etc), developing the study protocol, organizational tasks (cleaning and organizing dropbox), collecting the relevant literature, and helping refine the search term list. Furthermore, I worked extensively on the title, abstract, and full text screening for the relevant literature. This project will hopefully help determine how mental health providers’ knowledge, attitudes, and non-prescribing behaviors affect their prescribing decision-making for serious mental illness and be a useful tool in developing future prescribing guidelines. Throughout last semester, I finished the manuscript for this project and it is now being peer reviewed.

The second project I worked on was a systematic review evaluating the factor structures of PTSD and whether a universal PTSD factor structure could be identified. A factor structure is the correlational relationship between a number of variables that are said to measure a particular construct. Since the 1980s, four dominant symptom-based classification frameworks have been developed for PTSD. PTSD's lack of a universal factor model hinders population comparisons and cross-study, making it difficult to identify inconsistencies in the literature about determinants, outcomes, and treatments of PTSD. For this project, I was involved with cleaning and updating the PROSPERO protocol, collecting relevant literature, and providing the title, abstract, and full text screening for the relevant literature. This study will hopefully help determine the prevalence of a universal PTSD factor structure.

Conclusions

Through this internship, I was able to explore the more administrative side of public health and help further determine what I wanted to be involved with after graduation. I have decided that the research process is not particularly exciting for me but I find its applications (how to most effectively implement findings, etc) more interesting. Along with this, I have developed a passion for learning about how to help vulnerable populations receive adequate health care and increasing its accessibility. I understand that much of this has to do with public policy and am now considering a career in that area.

Through my internship experience at the Global Mental Health Program, I was able to learn some invaluable knowledge about mental health and illness, public health, patient care, and medical research.