Mental health is a thread that runs through the tapestry of life and society, meaning it also features as a central or contributing factor in almost all social science research.
Over the past few years, ISSR has extended our capacity for the study of mental health and wellbeing across the life course. We focus on understanding how the conditions in which people are born and live shape their mental health, and how the settings and institutions they interact with affect their wellbeing and life outcomes.
Understanding the social determinants of health and wellbeing is a shared preoccupation for our researchers, regardless of their training. Our interdisciplinary researchers apply methods and theories from sociology, economics, psychology, demography and other disciplines to situate mental health and wellbeing within a broader context. We are committed to improving population health outcomes and have a particular interest in learning how to best support vulnerable populations who are experiencing or at risk of experiencing poor mental health.
Associate Professor Abdullah Mamun joined ISSR in 2017 and has seen ISSR’s capacity for mental health research change over the past two years. “I’m a life course epidemiologist and I’m working with sociologists and neuropsychologists to design research on mental health and its comorbidities such as obesity and sleep problems as part of my work”, says Mamun.
The expertise of ISSR in mental health research is wide-ranging—our current research interests include obesity, sleep science, substance abuse, early childhood development, and stress—and we will consolidate and leverage this in 2019.
