When the Boston Public Health Commission hosted its mental health summit at Northeastern University on Oct. 21, the event drew mental health researchers and clinicians. It also brought together housing officials, economic development advocates and community members focused on decreasing inequity across the board.
Central to the premise of the Public Health Commission’s summit, which was hosted in partnership with the university’s Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research, was the idea that mental health struggles don’t exist in a vacuum.
The event aimed to reframe mental health as being shaped by broader social and structural conditions, called “social determinants of health” — factors outside of hospitals and clinics that can shape good or bad health outcomes.
During the panel on housing stability, Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, an applied health services researcher at Boston University, pointed to a 2024 study that looked at the intersection of evictions and psychological distress among pregnant African American women in Detroit. The research found that psychological distress increased among African American women in neighborhoods with higher eviction rates, even if they didn’t experience an eviction themselves.
“You can’t think forward in your life if you’re constantly scrabbling for the moment,” Ettinger de Cuba said.