Ivan Ramirez publishes on the intersection of housing and mental health

Published: Nov. 20, 2019

Along with colleagues at the University of Denver, Ivan Ramirez (Health & Behavioral Sciences Visiting Assistant Professor, and Research Affiliate for the Consortium for Capacity Building (CCB) and The Institute of Arctic & Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder) recently published on the intersection of housing and mental health in Colorado mapping critical social determinants of health. Affordable housing is a social determinant of health that creates a critical foundation for resilient and healthy communities. While it is clear that the stress of navigating unaffordable housing contributes to poor mental health, there is more to understand about the intersection of housing and mental health, especially related to the geographical locations in Colorado where these two persistent issues coincide. Using Colorado statewide data at the census tract level, this study employed various geospatial analytical techniques to investigate geographic relationships and identify priority area census tracts where the following two critical issues coincided: housing unaffordability (defined as rent burden) and high prevalence of mental health issues (defined as mental health distress, drug-related mortality, and suicide mortality).