Syracuse University's Shannon Monnat(PI), Jennifer Karas Montez (co-I), Doug Wolf (co-I), and Emily Wiemers (co-I) along with colleague David Wheeler from VCU were awarded a 1.9 million dollar grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The overarching objective of the project is to identify how the policies U.S. states enacted to combat the spread and adverse effects of COVID-19 may have affected psychological health and mortality from drug overdose and suicide among working-age and older adults in both the immediate and longer terms. The project will provide novel large-scale data on adult COVID-19 experiences and wellbeing and use the variation in policy responses across states to shed light on which policies and combinations of policies are consequential for adult psychological health and related mortality, the mechanisms through which policies affect those outcomes, and the population subgroups that are disproportionately affected. The overall findings will be essential for informing optimal policy responses in future pandemics.