Joe Himle, associate dean for faculty affairs and Howard V. Brabson Collegiate Professor of Social Work, is a mental health intervention researcher. He works to design, develop, and test mental health interventions with a focus on those who have limited access to interventions including racially and economically underserved populations.
Himle, who is also a professor of psychiatry in the U-M Medical School, joins Michigan Minds to talk about his research designing and developing lost-cost and accessible anxiety interventions.
Joe Himel, PhD
“Anxiety disorders come in a range of different types, but they have certain characteristics at their core,” he explains.
“People would rather not feel so anxious, day in and day out. Anxiety is part of our life. It’s a great tool for us in many ways. It makes us alert when danger might be there. It might also help us to pay attention to something we need to attend to. So, anxiety definitely does have some positives; that’s why we still have it, even though it feels uncomfortable,” he says, adding that for some people anxiety disorders do significantly affect their day-to-day life.
If anxiety interferes with someone’s functioning, then it becomes a mental health problem that needs attention, Himle says. He also talks about the Treatment, Innovation and Dissemination Research Group (TIDR), a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and community partners focused on improving psychosocial treatment for mental disorders and increasing access to evidence-based treatments for those conditions, particularly among traditionally underserved populations. TIDR is based at the U-M School of Social Work.
He outlines numerous innovative projects at TIDR, including several that are focused on suicide prevention and developing mental health treatments that are acessible and low-cost.
“We work together, we collaborate together both within our unit and across units to try to design innovative treatments that people like to do and are easy to access.”
The pandemic interfered with one of the main ways people keep themselves psychologically well, Himele says, by changing how people interacted and connected with others.
“Clearly one of the challenges that many people have is they’re a little rusty with interacting with others, so connecting again — meeting someone new, building a friendship, doing activities together,” Himle says. “It is really important to remember that human beings have survived and thrived based on building relationships with others and spending time with each other. So spending time together is a very important element that I think facing many young people, as many are transitioning from their home life back to school this fall.”
He adds that exercising, recreational activities, and traveling are things that were restricted throughout the pandemic but they are important for social connections and maintaining a balance in life.
Students, especially those heading to college campuses for the first time this fall, should focus on building connections, participating in activities, and spending time with others. Anxiety and depression often lead to avoidance, he explains, so it’s important to push aside tendencies to stay home and avoid interactions.
“It’s really important to take this opportunity this fall to try to get engaged in the opportunities that are available to you and to figure out what’s happening on campus. Doing some activities you’ve been putting off and connecting with others is a really important approach to preventing the kind of mental health trouble that often comes into people’s lives around this time in their life course,” he says, adding that sleep, eating regularly, and avoiding alcohol can also make a significant difference in keeping away anxiety and depressions.
“The vast majority of people with mental health problems never seek help; they don’t seek it often because it feels stigmatizing or they feel like they can access it if they don’t know exactly where to go.There’s a team of researchers here, as well as around the country and internationally, trying to help close this gap between the need and the available resources, but at the core of it it’s also the person who’s willing to step forward and willing to try to get some help.
“I spent decades helping people with mental health problems and as mental health counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, and others, those of us who focus and try to serve people with mental health problems, we probably haven’t made ourselves too appealing,” Himle says, acknowledging it might be scary to seek treatment. “Those of us in mental health interventions need to make ourselves a bit more appealing so sometimes having a treatment that’s a little more fun and that is easy to access is a real key for folks and that’s kind of our central focus in our [TIDR] group.”
