In her work on mental health care, Stephanie Hall is often searching for something elusive: evidence of an absence, a hint about what isn’t there rather than what is. It can be tricky to find — a kind of wizardry, pulling omissions out of datasets.
She starts by looking at an individual patient’s responses to a federal survey assessing pregnancy risks. How often do they feel down, depressed, or hopeless? How often have they felt little interest or pleasure in doing things? If they’ve experienced either or both frequently enough, chances are they might be experiencing symptoms of depression during or after pregnancy. Then, by linking up those data to that person’s Medicaid records, she can see whether or not that specific patient got a diagnosis.
“If there’s no diagnosis, then it means that there’s really no option for treatment,” said Hall. “So we can figure out who the health care system is missing.”
Hall almost missed out on doing this work. She was working as a project manager for the Veterans Administration when a mentor named Kara Zivin asked what she was interested in doing. “I said, I want to go back to school to get my Ph.D., but that would be silly,” she recalled. She already had two little kids at home; she was past the point of being in school.
Zivin disagreed. Now, as a postdoctoral fellow in Zivin’s lab at the University of Michigan, Hall is helping to pinpoint the policies that could help new parents get the mental health care they need.
— Eric Boodman
