In the News: Shannon Monnat

A group comprised of four researchers — representing the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and the Maxwell X Lab — will receive approximately $500,000 over three years in support of their research on different opioid court treatment interventions across New York State. 

While the urban opioid crisis is a crisis of heroin and illegal drugs, the rural opioid crisis of prescription drugs is largely a story of growing spatial inequality and of places left behind, most often occurring in places that tend to have a declining industrial base, finds a study co-authored by Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

“Many people who misuse opioids are also misusing other substances, and a common driver of this is self-medicating,” says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, whose research examines the connections between social disadvantage, place, public policy and health.

According to Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, the recent decline in life expectancy "is due almost entirely" to increases in overdoses and suicides. "Although the declines are small, they are unprecedented, and they are signals that there is a serious well-being crisis in the U.S."

Children today face three serious mental health crises: death from drugs, alcohol and suicide, says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion. "They’re much bigger societal issues that need to be addressed quickly or they’re going to manifest into something much more serious and then we’re going to be in big trouble not just now but decades to come."

"Opioids are far more deadly than any drugs that are entering through the U.S.-Mexico border,” says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, argues that in both rural and urban communities, two key factors—economic distress and supply of opioids—predict the rate of opioid deaths. "I really do want to push back against this cliché that addiction does not discriminate," Monnat says. "The physiological processes that underlie addiction themselves may not discriminate, but the factors that put people in communities at higher risk are are not spatially random."

"Opioids are a symptom and a symbol of far deeper issues in the U.S.," says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion. She points to deteriorating economic conditions, a lack of investment in schools, a quick-fix culture and a toxic mix of "pain, despair, disconnection and lack of opportunity" as upstream problems that have fed into the nation's current drug crisis.