Global Mental Health, Stigma, and Health Inequities: Fifteen Years of "Moral Experience"

Bio:
Dr. Lawrence Yang is Vice Chair and Associate Professor (Pending promotion to Full Professor) of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at NYU- School of Global Public Health. Dr. Yang also is Founding Director of the Global Mental Health and Stigma Program where he administers a generous donor gift from the Li Ka Shing Foundation and is Associate Director for the University-Wide Global Center for Implementation Science at NYU. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University. Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Boston University and completed his clinical training at Harvard Medical School.  He received a T32 NIMH-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University in psychiatric epidemiology. As part of an NIMH-funded K-award, he received training in medical anthropology at the Harvard Department of Social Medicine. Dr. Yang’s research focuses on two main areas: 1) Cognition of Untreated Psychosis, and; 2) Global Mental Health, Implementation Science, and Stigma. Dr. Yang is currently PI of two separate R01’s and a 3-year Supplement in China, which seek to examine the cognition in the ‘natural state’ of psychosis in a large untreated, community sample of individuals with psychosis (n=300), who have not yet received any antipsychotic medications, compared with a treated sample (n=300) and healthy controls (n=300) in China. He also is PI of a third R01 implementing task sharing measures for global mental health which seeks to validate a newly developed multi-dimensional measure that enables rapid assessment of modifiable critical factors that affect the implementation of task sharing mental health strategies. Dr. Yang has also formulated theoretical work on how culture relates to stigma and implementing interventions for culturally diverse groups, including Chinese immigrants with psychosis in New York City.  Dr. Yang utilized this framework via an NIMH-funded R21 intervention to counter culturally-salient aspects of HIV stigma that impede anti-retroviral treatment adherence in Botswana among pregnant women living with HIV. Dr. Yang has over 125 peer-reviewed publications, including publications in JAMA Psychiatry, British Journal of Psychiatry, and The American Journal of Public Health.  Dr. Yang has received seven national awards, most recently the 2021 Maltz Prize for Innovative and Promising Schizophrenia Research from the Brain and Behavioral Research Foundation, for his work.

Abstract:

Dr. Yang will present on his program of research integrating medical anthropology into global mental health and stigma to reduce health inequities. Dr. Yang will first present on the "Cognition of Untreated Psychosis in China," whereby Dr. Yang and his team are completing NIMH R01-funded data collection on a unique cohort of completely untreated, community-dwelling individuals with untreated schizophrenia (n~300) who on average have remain untreated for >20 years. He will describe how this rare cohort may provide new insights about the etiology and course of psychosis and enable important medical anthropological inquiry into how schizophrenia is understood as a disorder and potentially treated in a rural, low-resource setting. Dr. Yang will then trace how this China-based project fits into his larger body of work that utilizes the concept of “moral experience,” or “personhood” as defined in local groups, to elucidate new ways to understand, measure, and intervene against stigma in marginalized communities both locally and globally. He will highlight key projects that have used his novel conceptual formulation on the interrelationship of culture and stigma: i) his investigation of how stigma impacts undocumented Chinese immigrants with psychosis in New York City, funded by an NIMH K-award, and ii) his current application of this concept via efforts to reduce HIV-related stigma among pregnant mothers living with HIV in Botswana. In this latter project, Dr. Yang will explain how he used this theoretical framework to identify how beneficial healthcare policies, when implemented in the context of Botswana, yielded unintended structural consequences that ostracize women with HIV from “what matters most” in their daily lives. This work informed an NIMH-funded R21 intervention to counter culturally-salient aspects of HIV stigma that impede anti-retroviral treatment adherence in Botswana among pregnant women living with HIV. To conclude, Dr. Yang will present new advances in the utilization of the “moral experience” concept to address intersectional forms of stigma, promote equity, and improve global health for marginalized communities domestically and worldwide.