Online Intervention to Identify Students with Untreated Symptoms of Eating Disorders and Promote Mental Health Treatment: Winter/Spring 2015 (Pilot Study)

Disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction are common on college and university campuses, yet relative to other mental health problems common in student populations (e.g., depression and anxiety), considerably less is known about clinical and sub-clinical eating disorders. The Healthy Bodies Study (HBS) takes a public health approach by assessing a range of eating and body image measures at the population-level. HBS encompasses a number of related projects that seek to explore and address the prevalence and correlates of disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction and the help-seeking habits and attitudes of students with apparent need. The undergraduate years coincide with age of onset for eating disorders (19-25 years), presenting unique opportunities for early intervention on college campuses. Unfortunately, this opportunity is largely missed. The treatment gap -- the proportion of affected students not receiving treatment -- is wide: 80% of students with clinically significant symptoms do not receive care. Left untreated, eating disorders typically become more severe and refractory to treatment. In response to this, the HBS team developed and implemented a 12-week online intervention to identify students with untreated symptoms of eating disorders and promote help-seeking.The pilot study was conducted during the winter/spring 2015 semester on four college and university campuses. To ensure feasibility, the study was limited to four campuses while making every effort to ensure that these sites represented a diverse set of schools. The sites were: Appalachian State University, Bard College, Mercyhurst University, and University of Michigan

A study to determine the effects of a planned experience on nursing students' attitudes toward patient teaching

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

HIV Infection, Negative Life Events, and Intimate Relationship Power: The Moderating Role of Community Resources for Black South African Women

Background: Black South Africans were forced to live under the oppressive regime of apartheid for more than four decades. This system of government not only restricted the economic and educational opportunities for Blacks, but it also marginalized women by encouraging the preservation of a violent, patriarchal society. As a result of a long history of nationalized oppression, Black women in South Africa continue to be an economically and socially vulnerable group. Their vulnerability is translated into limited intimate relationship power, which confers a host of health and safety risks. Thus, the current study explored whether negative life events and/or HIV infection related directly to women’s intimate relationship power or was moderated by community-level variables (knowledge, helpfulness, and use of resources). Method: Participants were 104 women living with HIV and 152 non-infected women, who were recruited in and around Pretoria, South Africa. Two aspects of intimate relationship power were considered: relationship control (e.g. Partner controls what I wear) and decision making dominance (e.g. Who usually decides when you have sex?). Decision-making dominance was divided into three subscales (male dominant, female dominant and mutual). Results: For relationship control, fewer undesirable life changes were associated with more control. For decision-making dominance, several main and interaction effects were observed. Negative serostatus and women’s knowledge of community resources were directly associated with more mutual decision-making. However, more frequent family use of community resources was related to less female dominated decisions. For helpfulness of resources, a significant interaction revealed that women living with HIV/AIDS perceived their male partners as less dominant when they perceived their community resources to be more helpful. Conclusions: Power in intimate relationships may enhance the quality and length of life for Black South African women; thus, it is important to identify factors that promote or compromise power. The results of this study suggest that undesirable life changes, HIV infection, and great reliance on community resources (i.e. frequent use) are negatively associated with perceived relationship power. Alternatively, the current study identified the perceived helpfulness of community resources as one possible factor that promotes relationship power

Understanding and Addressing Unmet Need for Mental Health Services in College Populations.

In my dissertation, the main problem of interest is that the majority of college students with mental health problems (roughly 60%) do not receive treatment. This problem is quantified as the “treatment gap”. Population-level interventions to promote help-seeking commonly focus on reducing stigma, improving knowledge, and increasing access. Overall, these interventions have had limited success in changing students’ help-seeking behaviors. I argue that new approaches are needed to narrow the campus mental health treatment gap. Through detailed descriptive analyses of two large-scale, primary data sets, I find that stigma, misinformation, and lack of access do not appear to be the most salient barriers to treatment for students in need. Instead, students most commonly report not seeking help for reasons that imply lack of urgency and lack of perceived need: “I haven’t had a need”, “I question how serious my needs are”, and “I don’t have time”. These reasons are not directly accounted for in current campus help-seeking interventions. In response to this, I introduce and evaluate a new approach based on concepts from behavioral economics and social psychology. This approach acknowledges cognitive biases that may impede mental health service utilization, namely social comparison bias, problematic time preferences, and procrastination. These interrelated biases offer a lens through which to understand the pervasive lack of urgency surrounding help-seeking for mental health. To address these biases, I designed an online intervention for undergraduates with untreated symptoms of eating disorders, as identified in a baseline screen. Through weekly messages, the intervention tried to reframe the help-seeking decision and facilitate the link to treatment. Findings suggest that the intervention had modest but significant effects on help-seeking behavior and attitudes. Most notably, 8% of students received treatment, representing a more than three-fold increase in help-seeking behavior over the 12-week study period. Though there were statistically significant effects on treatment utilization, over 90% of students were still untreated after the intervention. Based on findings from the survey data and feedback collected through post-intervention interviews, I describe specific next steps for optimizing the intervention and overarching priorities for addressing the campus mental health treatment gap moving forward.PhDIndependent Interdepartmental Degree ProgramUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133195/1/sklipson_1.pd

The Healthy Bodies Study: 2015 Data Report

Disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction are common in undergraduate and graduate student populations. Previous campus mental health research has focused primarily on depression, anxiety, suicidality, and substance use. Considerably less is known about eating disorders relative to other mental health problems common in student populations. This is particularly true when considering that eating disorders, like other mental health problems, exist along a continuum of severity. Where much attention has been paid to subclinical depression and anxiety in national epidemiological campus-based research, measures of disordered eating have typically been reduced to but a handful of questions about specific behaviors, often described in clinical terms. While important studies have addressed eating disorders in specifically defined student sub-groups (e.g., sorority women, female athletes, students from certain academic departments), these are usually single-site studies with limited generalizability. HBS takes a public health approach by assessing a range of eating and body image measures at the population-level.An annual web-based survey, HBS aims to understand students' relationships with eating, dieting, exercising, and body image, and how these relationships, in turn, fit into a larger picture of student health and well-being. HBS seeks to explore the prevalence and correlates of disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction, and the extent to which students with apparent need are utilizing mental health resources. Through close collaborations with campus practitioners and national mental health organizations, HBS researchers strive to inform policy and practice on college and university campuses. HBS is administered to a randomly selected sample of undergraduate and graduate students at participating institutions. An important contribution to the field of college student mental health, HBS addresses the diversity of disordered eating behaviors and attitudes among the diversity of students on college and university campuses today

The Healthy Bodies Study: 2014 Data Report

Disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction are common in undergraduate and graduate student populations. Previous campus mental health research has focused primarily on depression, anxiety, suicidality, and substance use. Considerably less is known about eating disorders relative to other mental health problems common in student populations. This is particularly true when considering that eating disorders, like other mental health problems, exist along a continuum of severity. Where much attention has been paid to subclinical depression and anxiety in national epidemiological campus-based research, measures of disordered eating have typically been reduced to but a handful of questions about specific behaviors, often described in clinical terms. While important studies have addressed eating disorders in specifically defined student sub-groups (e.g., sorority women, female athletes, students from certain academic departments), these are usually single-site studies with limited generalizability. HBS takes a public health approach by assessing a range of eating and body image measures at the population-level.An annual web-based survey, HBS aims to understand students' relationships with eating, dieting, exercising, and body image, and how these relationships, in turn, fit into a larger picture of student health and well-being. HBS seeks to explore the prevalence and correlates of disordered eating and body image dissatisfaction, and the extent to which students with apparent need are utilizing mental health resources. Through close collaborations with campus practitioners and national mental health organizations, HBS researchers strive to inform policy and practice on college and university campuses.HBS is administered to a randomly selected sample of undergraduate and graduate students at participating institutions. An important contribution to the field of college student mental health, HBS addresses the diversity of disordered eating behaviors and attitudes among the diversity of students on college and university campuses today

Thin superconductors and SQUIDs in perpendicular magnetic field

It is shown how the static and dynamic electromagnetic properties can be calculated for thin flat superconducting films of any shape and size, also multiply connected as used for SQUIDs, and for any value of the effective magnetic London penetration depth Lambda. As examples, the distributions of sheet current and magnetic field are obtained for rectangular and circular films without and with slits and holes, in response to an applied perpendicular magnetic field and to magnetic vortices moving in the film. The self energy and interaction of vortices with each other and with an applied magnetic field and/or transport current are given. Due to the long ranging magnetic stray field, these energies depend on the size and shape of the film and on the vortex position even in large films, in contrast to the situation in large bulk superconductors. The focussing of magnetic flux into the central hole of square films without and with a radial slit is compared.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Promoting Resilience, Retention, and Mental Health

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135584/1/ss20194.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135584/2/ss20194_am.pd

High coherence hybrid superconducting qubit

We measure the coherence of a new superconducting qubit, the {\em low-impedance flux qubit}, finding $T_2^* \sim T_1 \sim 1.5\mu$s. It is a three-junction flux qubit, but the ratio of junction critical currents is chosen to make the qubit's potential have a single well form. The low impedance of its large shunting capacitance protects it from decoherence. This qubit has a moderate anharmonicity, whose sign is reversed compared with all other popular qubit designs. The qubit is capacitively coupled to a high-Q resonator in a $\lambda/2$ configuration, which permits the qubit's state to be read out dispersively