Alison Karasz
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Depression and poverty feed each other. Poverty can cause depression, and depression makes it harder to work and earn, trapping people in a cycle.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
depression
poverty
global mental health
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether combining Problem Management Plus (PM+), a group talk therapy, with an asset and skill transfer program improves depression more than PM+ alone, in a cluster randomized trial of 660 women across 44 villages in rural Bangladesh.
- Follow participants for 24 months and run a mixed-methods process evaluation, including qualitative interviews with participants and staff, to generate hypotheses about program and community factors that shape outcomes.
- Embed a rapid ethnography in four trial villages, using interviews, focus groups and structured observation, to study how household, neighborhood and village context affects treatment engagement and response.
- Compare treatment arms, women who stayed versus dropped out, and responders versus non-responders to identify social factors that may change or explain the effect of the intervention.
- Train young researchers from Rangpur and the University of Dhaka in fieldwork, clinical trial design, research ethics and qualitative data analysis.
More about the research
The cycle is especially common among low-income women in poor countries. Programs that treat depression rarely deal with poverty, and anti-poverty programs rarely deal with mental health. This work tests whether treating both together helps more than treating depression alone. It focuses on depressed, low-income women in villages of the flood-prone Rangpur region of northern Bangladesh. Alongside the trial, an ethnographic study looks at the local social conditions that shape who benefits.
Why it matters
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is common among poor rural women. If combining therapy with asset transfers works better than therapy alone, the results could guide government agencies, NGOs and economic development groups in Bangladesh and other low-income countries. These groups could then build joint programs that address mental health and poverty together, which may improve both wellbeing and economic productivity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Italo Lopez Garcia
University of Southern California, CA·Social Science
Measure whether gains from Msingi Bora, an 8-month group parenting program in rural Kenya, persist about five years later in children's cognitive, language, executive function and social-emotional skills, using a follow-up survey across 60 villages.
Audrey Pettifor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the longitudinal link between childhood adversity and depression differs by cash transfer exposure, using HPTN 068 trial data on 2,533 rural South African girls and Child Support Grant data from the Agincourt surveillance system.
Alexander Bartik
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Social Science
Estimate how an extra $1,000 per month changes health-related behaviors and surroundings, such as nutrition, food security, exercise, substance use, sleep and neighborhood, by comparing randomized cash transfer groups.
The school
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: 29 labs on PI Pages, $350M a year on research, 55 research doctorates a year.
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