The Humana Foundation gave IU a $300,000 grant in August to fund a study aiming to improve emotional connectedness between teachers and students in K-12 schools. The study focuses on marginalized communities and suicide prevention.
Anna Mueller, an IU sociology professor and expert in youth suicide prevention, is heading this study. Mueller said young people from different backgrounds often don’t receive equitable access to suicide prevention care, which has an impact on emotional connectedness between students and teachers. Emotional connectedness is the connection that students and teachers have emotionally. When emotional connectedness is low, students do not feel vulnerable enough to speak with staff at their school about such taboo topics like suicide. This has led to disparities for LGBTQ+ students, language minority students and students who are from rural areas — groups that will be the focus of this study.
“We don’t really have effective prevention strategies for schools, and we’re also lacking a consideration of equity,” Mueller said.
Mueller has spent the last few years of her career at IU working on youth suicide prevention in Colorado. She explained the study’s research groups developed naturally from her research there.
“Those three populations just emerged as incredibly important, and they emerged as groups who were not being fully served by existing mental health support strategies in school,” she said.
Mueller and her team plan to receive a National Institutes of Health funded grant so they can continue the study after the 18-month Humana Foundation grant ends. Mueller said this initial funding will be crucial in gathering early data to show the study’s importance and build a case for ongoing support.
Assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences Natasha Chaku is also teaming up with Mueller. She said weaving their models together creates a more comprehensive study that can help more students. She added that their study is extremely unique because they can use different perspectives from different researchers, a they plan to study how often students reach out for help and teachers' emotional connectedness to those students. Studying these variables helps prevention efforts, Chaku said.
“Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents and young people between the ages of 10 to 25,” Chaku said. “So, it’s a leading public health concern, and a big problem requires big teams.”
As the study progresses, the team said they hope their findings will resonate beyond Indiana and Colorado, providing a model that schools across the country can adopt. With its focus on emotional connectedness and targeted prevention for underserved groups, the research aims to acknowledge the mental health needs in diverse communities.
The Humana Foundation has been providing grants for nonprofit organizations that support community health for 43 years. According to the portfolio strategy principal for Humana’s research grant division, Soojin Conover, the foundation awarded its first research grant in 2023.
“The research grants program is a pretty new program that we are very excited about,” Conover said.
Conover said she hopes the funding will lead to research with important implications for students in Bloomington and across the country.
“The research findings are expected to benefit broader communities where high school students are living, but I hope this research will also positively impact students in Bloomington as well by enhancing suicide prevention,” she said.
