Caitlin Ryus
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology
People who are homeless carry a far heavier burden of mental illness and early death than people who are housed, and housing insecurity sharply raises the odds of arriving at an emergency department in a behavioral health crisis. Part of that burden may come from the shelter environment itself.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
homelessness
housing insecurity
non-congregate shelter
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Explore qualitatively how non-congregate housing policies may affect mental illness among people experiencing homelessness, including a landscape analysis of how shelter and healthcare providers partner on housing needs.
- Estimate the effect of Connecticut's 2020-2022 hotel-based shelter program on mental health crises using electronic medical record data and a difference-in-differences comparison with a control site in Alabama.
- Prospectively evaluate, with mixed methods, how current non-congregate options such as private spaces within existing shelters and tiny house villages affect mental health outcomes.
- Apply community-based participatory research with people experiencing homelessness and healthcare-housing partnership organizations to identify which partnership features support mental health.
More about the research
Traditional shelters are congregate, meaning residents share sleeping space, while during recent years many cities moved residents into non-congregate settings, most often hotel rooms, and some evidence suggests mental health improved. Connecticut carried out a statewide non-congregate shelter program from 2020 to 2022 and is now designing new policies that deliver non-congregate options through partnerships between healthcare organizations and community housing groups. Whether and how those options affect mental health is the question this project addresses.
Why it matters
Shelter policy is being rewritten in many places, often without evidence on how living arrangements affect mental health. By measuring whether moving people from shared shelters into hotel rooms, private shelter spaces or tiny house villages changes rates of mental health crises, this work could give Connecticut and other states concrete grounds for designing shelter programs, and could improve how healthcare and housing organizations partner to serve people experiencing homelessness.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lesley Weaver
University of Oregon, OR·Social Science
Compare physical health and health risk factors across four groups of people experiencing houselessness—unsheltered, encampment, temporary shelter and permanent supportive housing—to find which settings drive health differences.
Matthew Eisenberg
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Estimate how eviction moratoriums, emergency rental assistance and right to counsel for tenants affected rates of substance use treatment, using a 50-state difference-in-differences analysis of IQVIA, HCUP and TEDS treatment data.
Julia Rosenberg
Yale University, CT·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Determine whether state-level expansions of health insurance eligibility are associated with changes in children's insurance enrollment and preventive care, using repeated National Survey of Children's Health data.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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