Mary Ann Dutton, PhD, Receives Three Year Grant
from National Institutes of Mental Health
Mary Ann Dutton, Professor of Psychiatry and
Associate Director of the Center for Trauma and the Community, received an R34
grant entitled A First-Line Community-Based Mindfulness Trauma Intervention from
the National Institute of Mental Health. The study, which will run for three
years, addresses an important new area in trauma.
The overall goal is to address the huge mental health care disparity for low-income, minority women exposed to intimate partner violence by obtaining new knowledge and skills in order to develop and test an accessible, tailored, and culturally-appropriate mindfulness-based intervention sustainable as a first-line intervention or delivery in non-mental health community settings. To narrow the remarkable mental health disparities gap, three interrelated studies using different methodologies will be conducted to develop and pilot test an adapted mindfulness-based trauma intervention. The proposal has three specific aims 1) to develop a mindfulness-based trauma intervention for PTSD and other trauma-related psychological (depression, somatic symptoms, quality of life). Intervention development will include writing intervention and training manuals, developing measures of intervention fidelity, and pre-piloting the intervention for feasibility and accountability; 2) to pilot test the interventions with low-income, predominately African-American women exposed to intimate partner violence and to examine potential mediators (mindfulness, coping self-efficacy, social support) of improved outcomes, and 3) to pilot test measures of the cost of administering the intervention. This pilot study will provide preliminary data for a rigorous large scale clinical trial to examine both self-report and biological outcomes of the mindfulness-based trauma intervention.
