By: Tiffany Whitfield and Brianna Goodall
Old Dominion University Associate Professor Cassie Glenn is conducting significant research to improve mental health for young people in the Hampton Roads area and beyond. Her work delves into a very sensitive subject because it relates to suicide prevention among young people. Through her suicide prevention research, Glenn and a team of scientists at ODU in Norfolk, and across the country, are searching for answers and ways to combat this issue to save lives.
“Our research broadly is interested in understanding factors that lead young people to have thoughts or engage in behaviors related to harming themselves, to better understand how those types of thoughts develop, how they might escalate, and how we can best support them to reduce risk and improve well-being for them and for their families,” said Glenn.
Here at ODU, she directs the Youth Risk and Resilience Lab which is a youth suicide prevention research lab, where students have the opportunity to learn more about research, particularly with high-risk youth. “We work closely with Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughter (CHKD), with young people and their families who have sought care at CHKD because of suicide risk, and working with them after they leave the hospital,” said Glenn. “Students in my lab have the opportunity to observe some of the research that’s being done in my lab and to observe clinical interviews to assist with data entry and data cleaning to learn more about what a career in clinical science looks like.”
Graduate students who work in the Glenn Lab assist with a number of the projects that undergraduates work on but in a different capacity. “My graduate students have a lot of interests some of which overlap very closely with mine but some sort of branch off the trunk of what is the main focus of the lab,” said Glenn. Her Clinical Psychology graduate students are interested in a range of topics like “sleep problems that may relate to suicide risk” and how finding ways to improve sleep could potentially improve a young person’s well-being. “A number of my students are interested in understanding risk among youth with minoritized identities and how racial discrimination or discrimination related to sexual and gender identity may increase risk, and how we can leverage strengths of these communities to help foster resilience,” said Glenn.
Collaboration and a wide range of community partners play an integral part in saving lives. Locally, Dr. Mary Margaret Gleason at CHKD has been a collaborator for several years growing the community and resources. “We also work with other universities, so a lot of our grants are multi-site,” said Glenn. Some of the other institutions include Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in the Boston area and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. “We are asking questions not just here but across the U.S. to look at the generalizability of our findings,” said Glenn.
Another major research area is aimed at understanding the experiences of youth who work with youth-to-youth or teen-to-teen crisis lines. “For that work we’re partnering with Teen Line in the L.A. area and Youth Line in the Portland, Oregon area who run two of the largest teen-to-teen crisis lines in the U.S.,” said Glenn.
In addition to her research, Glenn teaches various undergraduate and graduate level courses aimed at transforming lives and reducing stigma associated with mental health conditions. She currently teaches Psychopathology at the undergraduate level, and she teaches Personality and Psychopathology Assessment for first-year clinical psychology doctoral students. This class teaches graduate students how to assess for a range of mental health conditions as well as to assess and manage suicide risk.
Since being at ODU, Glenn has worked hard to build up the mental health resources and infrastructure at ODU to get students and those in the community the help they need. Being a woman in science is something she prides herself on.
Glenn said, “I think it is an amazing opportunity to get to mentor the next generation of psychologists and clinical scientists, and my role as a mentor is something that I take very seriously. I’m very fortunate here in the Department of Psychology to be in a very supportive department that supports all of me as a faculty member and as a woman in STEM.”