Lerner Center News

Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, discusses the need to address the underlying causes of distress, despair and disconnectedness in regards to the opioid epidemic.

Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, says her findings indicate that places where rates of death due to drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and suicide are high are also places that heavily supported Trump in the election.

Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, and her team secured a grant from the National Institute of Justice to conduct a study that will provide recommendations to law enforcement agencies on how to maximize the efficiency of disrupting the supply of opiates into communities and develop a model for use in other jurisdictions.

"Typically people who qualify for higher SNAP benefits are in the worst health, so this suggests there is something really protective about the SNAP benefits," says Colleen Heflin, professor of public administration and international affairs.

"In the places with high rates of drug, alcohol and suicide mortality, economic distress has been building and social and family networks have been breaking down for several decades," says Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

“Shannon Monnat is committed to disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship that informs, benefits, and influences public policy and the public good,” says David M. Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School. “She brings timely and important research, a public orientation and unbounded energy to the intellectual leadership of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion."

The map of Trump’s victory looked eerily similar to her documentation of deaths of despair, according to Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair of Public Health Promotion, from New England through the Rust Belt to the rural coast of Washington.

The Monday Mile is a part of the Lerner Center's Healthy Monday Campaign, an initiative aimed at offering weekly prompts and programs to support people and participating organizations in starting and sustaining healthy behaviors.

"We hear it a lot: Can we just have conversations and be on a first-name basis with officers?" says Rebecca Bostwick, managing director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. "And [cops] have been good about it at the Near Westside block parties—just shoot some hoops with the kids. It's a work in progress. I'm optimistic about what the field house can do to move that forward."

The Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion collaborated with Pet Partners of Central New York, a local chapter of a national organization that offers animal-assisted therapy and activities with the help of people-animal volunteer teams, for National Public Health Week.