The Hol Picture

Our Insights on Real-World Evidence and Behavioral Health

Posts about:

socioenvironmental factors

Capitalizing on untapped value: Extracting environmental stressors from clinical notes via natural language processing

Consider an emergency room doctor who is caring for a patient who has been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. When she consults his chart, she can see that he has been diagnosed with depression, but the structured data that is immediately available does not provide much additional context. 

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A look inside NeuroBlu: Structured socioenvironmental stressor data

Huge amounts of data are collected throughout a person’s journey through the behavioral healthcare system. From demographic data captured during intake to in-depth conversations between patients and clinicians about symptoms, daily activities, and goals, most of the information captured about a patient becomes part of their electronic health record (EHR). 

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Considering socioenvironmental factors in clinical and research settings

Imagine that you are a therapist seeing a new patient for the first time. The patient says that while she has no history of clinical depression, she has been feeling really sad lately and has lost interest in the things she normally enjoys, such as cooking and creating new recipes. 

When you start to ask questions, however, you begin to uncover the factors that may be impacting what your patient is currently experiencing. She tells you she has recently moved across the country and has had trouble finding a new community where she feels connected. Because she feels so sad most of the time, she has stopped calling anyone from her previous home, telling you that she “doesn’t want to bring them down.” You hypothesize that the recent drastic changes in her environment may be contributing to the symptoms of depression she describes.

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Nature and nurture: How environment and biology shape mental health

As a mental health clinician and researcher, I have seen firsthand how our understanding of the role that biological and socioenvironmental factors play in mental health has evolved over time. For many years, the debate over nature vs. nurture dominated discussions in the field, but more recent models have focused on the interaction between genes and the environment, such as the diathesis stress model.

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