Great plan! I might take you up on that 😁

Interesting! Please keep me (everyone?) posted on your talk and share a video link if possible, because I'm trying to learn more about causal mediation at the moment. Would like to use it for a study, but only if justifiable... Thanks!

I’d say the opposite. Until tenure it’s one of the most uncertain careers. After tenure the balance between teaching and research depends on annual grant applications. Academics do tend to be uncertainty-intolerant of character, maybe that’s what’s causing the confusion ;)

This was a team effort with talented and driven colleagues from multiple countries. Funding was provided by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, who have long aided economic and social development in Moldova. Nobody is on BlueSky yet, but I'm sure they will be soon. FIN

These data provide input for targeted treatment efforts such as community mental health centers, which have been set up in the country in the last 5 years. Data also suggest that effective prevention of mental ill-health must consider the socioeconomic conditions in which we live.

There are limitations to the work. Data were collected during the covid-19 pandemic and while war already raged in neighboring Ukraine, so they may not generalize to other time periods. The symptom screeners are not clinical interviews. But the study provides good initial data where there were none.

As found worldwide, low-income participants (<2/3 of poverty line, 22% of population) had much worse mental health than high-income (>2x poverty line, 25% of pop.). The low-income group had nearly 2x higher odds of screening for depression, when controlling for education, employment & demographics.

Older adults (56–64y) had more anxiety and lower well-being than younger age groups. This contradicts data from other countries, where older age tends to go with better mental health. Suggests it's not an effect of aging itself but of idiosyncratic socioeconomic factors such as pensions.

We found that women had higher rates of depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and loneliness than men. For symptoms of depression and anxiety (internalizing disorders), this is also in line with findings in other countries such as the Netherlands and the United States.

Overall, about 20% of the population screened positive for depression and about 25% for anxiety. This is in line with observations around the same time in other Eastern-European countries. (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....)

We used basic screeners for anxiety and depression (PHQ/GAD-2), for which a validated Romanian version is available. We also asked about socioeconomic living conditions and collected demographics.

bsky.app/profile/jero...

In all these cases, we could not fathom the outcome when the money was given. The grants probably appeared wasteful at the time. But they were critical to America’s dominance in the world. If you want to live in the light, don’t switch it off.

3) a forerunner of the internet itself, ARPANET, was developed with a grant from the Department of Defense. www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET

2) the monoclonal antibody treatment Trump received for his covid-19 infection in 2020 was developed by Renegeron with a $611 million grant from the department of Health and Human Services, not to mention all the NIH-funded basic research that made it possible; www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_A...

1) our beloved AI chatbots only exists because of NSF-funded basic neuroscience research in the 1980s; www.goldengooseaward.org/01awardees/pdp