
COVID-19 Pandemic and Mental Health: Creating Organizational Communities of Care
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Megan Holmes
Associate Professor and Co-Director
Center on Trauma and Adversity, Case Western Reserve University
Dr. Megan R. Holmes is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center on Trauma and Adversity. She has 15 years of clinical practice and research experience working in the field of child exposure to domestic violence, which continues to be a serious and highly prevalent social problem that can negatively affect children’s behavioral and mental health outcomes both in the short term and over the life course. The overarching goal of Dr. Holmes’s work is to contribute to the optimal development of children who have been exposed to domestic violence by identifying risk and protective factors that will be translated into interventions. Her current research also focuses on creating community and system responses to trauma that promotes relational health and healing throughout Cleveland and the state of Ohio. Dr. Holmes’s most recent work has focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and the ways in which individuals are building resilience and coping with the psychological stress of the pandemic. In March 2020, Dr. Holmes lead a team of researcher to launch the COVID-19 Pandemic and Emotional Well-Being Study, a national prospective panel study of over 1,200 respondents, that examined the psychological effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on first responders, essential classified workers, and the general public. Findings from the first wave of data collection indicate elevated levels of posttraumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. Building off of this research, Dr. Holmes was awarded a grant from the Cleveland Brain Institute to better understand the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, identify coping strategies used to reduce stress, and examine the relations between social inequalities, COVID-19, and mental health. This study is currently in the data collection phase.
@DrMeganHolmes
@CenterOnTrauma