Research
“In the real world of care, medical treatments were not as good as we thought…I was showing [a community group] the spectacular success we had had with stem cell studies of neurons in schizophrenia… mapping specific genetic variants for autism, how we had created great models on the epigenetics of stress and depression. And somebody got up at the back of the room and said, ‘You know, I have a 23-year-old son with schizophrenia. He's been hospitalized five times. He's been in jail three times. He made two suicide attempts.
Look, man, our house is on fire and you're talking about the chemistry of the paint.’”
Thomas Insel, NIMH Director 2002-2015 (quoted in 2022)
“Frequently, there is no attempt made to explore beyond the illness. It is often forgotten that there is a person behind the condition, with a fundamental need to be understood… We must be seen as individuals and not regarded as just a collection of symptoms.”
Robert Bayley, writer and musician who lives with schizophrenia, 1996
What does it mean to understand a person?
At the Wellness in Emerging Lives Lab (WELL), we work to understand the person behind serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia. People living with these illnesses often want to find meaning, battle hopelessness, and challenge stigma, while research typically focuses on brain mechanisms, medication, and symptom reduction. We aim to bridge this gap through person-centered research that generates meaningful insights into illness while aligning with the priorities of those affected.
What is person-centered research?
In developmental psychopathology, we recognize that psychological variables we observe today (personality traits, cognitive abilities, symptoms, etc.) have a history in people’s lives. As variables evolve from childhood throughout a person’s lifetime, they form a dynamic network of interconnected threads. This complex system forms who a person is today, within the context of how and why they came to be that way.
In other words, people emerge from complex interactions of many variables. Psychological research can approach this complex system from the bottom up, layering as many threads (ie. variables) as possible so that the person emerges from the interaction of threads over time. Or, we can take a top-down approach, recognizing that people are intentional, self-organizing systems who actively make meaning from their experiences. Outside the lab, people have already emerged from the data by creating a self-understanding that reflects their own expertise on their life and experiences. Bottom-up approaches let data reveal the person, while top-down approaches start from the person’s self-understanding to determine which data matter.
How can person-centered research improve our understanding of mental illness?
As serious mental illness develops, the threads of a person’s life become more complex.
At the Wellness in Emerging Lives Lab, we combine transdiagnostic and longitudinal modeling of personality, symptoms, and real-world functioning (bottom-up approaches) with detailed exploration of participants’ self-understanding (top-down approaches) to help us understand the illness without losing sight of the person behind it. By exploring the individuality of the person behind a mental illness, we form a richer understanding of both the individual and their illness. This individualized perspective builds a foundation for personalized risk assessment, prevention, and treatment.
Recent and Ongoing Projects
Multimethod assessment of action perceptions
People with schizophrenia often experience altered perception of actions and consequences in their environments. These alterations stem from both automatic ("bottom-up") and conscious ("top-down") brain processes. However, current lab methods to study these processes are slow, costly, and not well-suited for large or diverse populations. This study combines innovative online experimental tasks, clinical assessment, and life story interviews to better understand how action perceptions are altered in schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses, and how these affect people’s daily experience.
Narrative identity in the development of psychosis
The first symptoms of psychosis tend to appear during a crucial time in young people’s self-development, in adolescence or emerging adulthood (ages 14-25). These are the years when young people typically start constructing an adult self-concept and life story to guide their goals, values, and motivations throughout the lifespan. The puzzling and distressing early stages of psychosis change these developmental patterns, causing unique challenges in self-understanding. In an ongoing line of research, we are examining the life stories of young people at high risk for psychosis and who have experienced a first psychotic episode, to understand how they work to construct coherent personal narratives amid these experiences.
Transdiagnostic clinical staging
Our lab takes a transdiagnostic approach to understanding the development of serious mental illness, aiming to understand how and when these issues first start to appear in young people’s lives. This research includes structural modeling of transdiagnostic symptom profiles in young people at various developmental stages, analysis of the developmental functioning prior to the onset of mental health challenges, and development of improved assessment tools for tracking functioning across developmental periods.
Expert engagement in reviews
Systematic reviews synthesize existing bodies of research, making them powerful tools for guiding science, clinical decisions, and policy. They become even more impactful when they involve people with lived experience, particularly in mental health, where symptoms and recovery are deeply personal. Despite clear benefits such as improved relevance, credibility, and adoption of findings, meaningful engagement of experts by experience remains rare in systematic reviews of mental health topics. We prioritize feedback from the community and experts by experience in our research process, and in a current line of research, we are collaborating with experts by experience on several review studies. The goal of this line of research is to incoporate insights from people with lived experience to evaluate current practices and offer recommendations for more meaningful engagement.