The College of Arts and Sciences’ CHRR at The Ohio State University is at the heart of a new study aiming to identify the root causes of mental illness and addiction in Ohio.

Introduced by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in January, the $20 million research initiative — called the State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience (SOAR) Study — looks to examine different biological, psychological and social factors that have led to a rise in mental illness, suicide and deaths related to drug overdose over the past decade in Ohio.

There are two key components of the SOAR Study, which is run by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, the College of Medicine and the team of K. Luan Phan, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health and principal investigator of the study. The first component is the SOAR Wellness Discovery Survey, which collects information on the social and psychological makeup of approximately 13,000 Ohioans, while the SOAR Brain Health Study looks to gather biological, brain function, psychological and social environment data from 3,600 Ohioans.

Leading the survey component for the SOAR Wellness Discovery Survey is the CHRR (Center for Human Resource Research), which was founded in 1965 and will be celebrating 60 years in 2025. It studies socioeconomic factors through survey research, including longitudinal studies dating back to 1979. As part of the SOAR Study, the CHRR is sending over 300,000 postcards to survey Ohioans from all walks of life in their communities.

“That survey targets 13,000 Ohioans, wanting to match very closely the demographics of the state, making sure that citizens from all 88 counties are represented in that sample in a number of important ways,” said Dr. Stephen Gavazzi, director of the CHRR.

The CHRR connected with the SOAR Study after previously conducting the Ohio Gambling Survey in 2022 for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, which funded the SOAR Study. The Ohio Gambling Survey was a survey of almost 15,000 Ohioans across all 88 counties, a similar data collection to what the SOAR Study was seeking.

“What we are doing is a survey of a randomly selected representational sample of Ohioans, and part of the aim of the survey is to get an idea of where Ohioans are in terms of mental health,” said Dr. Canada Keck, who is leading the project for the CHRR. “But we are also getting information about social support systems and about childhood exposure, both to positive things and to negative things.”

Other key data points include information about where participants live, their educational background, questions of resiliency and how they handle problems, and potential substance abuse. Keck said the CHRR had surpassed 10,800 respondents in mid-September and hoped to reach 11,500 by the end of the month.

“We know from past experience exactly what it takes to get these kinds of numbers, and so there's a science to this, obviously, but there's a little bit of an art form to it as well,” Gavazzi said. “The original postcard that we sent out was designed to capture people's attention and imagination about what it means to participate in a survey like this, with a strong emphasis on helping people to better understand what their lives look like.”

Data collected by the CHRR will be used to help advance mental health and substance use prevention science, and treatment interventions. The CHRR hopes this becomes a longitudinal study that can continue for years, sharing a vision with DeWine that it can be the mental health equivalent of the Framingham Heart Study. That Massachusetts-based study that has been conducted since 1948 and made several significant research findings.

“We are trying to help researchers do the best social science research they can,” Keck said. “Mental health is one of the most important topics, because historically, there was such secrecy around mental health issues, and we have a real crisis in Ohio in terms of addiction and death from opioid overdose and deaths from suicides.

“Only through really understanding all these different aspects of a person's life, both the biology and the mental and social world they're inhabiting, can we start formulating ways to help communities and to help individuals to do the best kind of outreach we can do.”

In addition to the CHRR, the College of Medicine and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, the SOAR Study is also collaborating with other in-state universities such as Bowling Green State University, Case Western Reserve University, Central State University, Kent State University, Ohio University, the University of Cincinnati, The University of Toledo and Wright State University.

“We're pleased to be at the tip of the sword in terms of beginning to do this kind of scientific work,” Gavazzi said.