2D image of a brain scan with light bokeh and artifacts placed in an abstract manner.
Austin Wyman standing in a sport coat and his hands crossed.
University of Notre Dame

Fighting to combat America's mental health crisis

Luchando para combatir la crisis de salud mental en Estados Unidos

Notre Dame is building a new clinic to advance research, education, and clinical care to address mental health issues

What would you fight for?

Austin Wyman ’23 was young when the mental health crisis hit home. A struggling family member reached out to a provider for help, but with no immediately available appointments, the relative soon had a mental health episode. The situation ended in the death of two of Wyman’s family members, and left the rest of them reeling.

Now, Wyman is working to ensure other families don’t experience that kind of tragedy.

Wyman is a doctoral student in Notre Dame’s quantitative psychology program. The program trains students in statistical methods, quantitative models, and data science that can be applied to psychological research or methods development.

Wyman explained, “In biology and physics you have a lot of direct measurements, like you can see phenomena in the natural world and measure it. In psychology, we don’t have that luxury. We work with something called latent variables, which are variables that cannot be directly observed. And because they can’t be directly observed, you sort of have to tease them out in order to get the information you need from them, like you can’t look at something and say, that’s depression. No, you have to use indicators to understand that it’s depression,” he said, adding that signs such as irritability, low energy, and moodiness help indicate depression, but they aren’t certainties.

A headshot of Austin Wyman with numbers projected on his face.
Austin Wyman, a doctoral student in quantitative psychology, is leveraging AI and machine learning to improve measurement and diagnostic tools for mental health.

Wyman’s research involves using existing psychological questionnaires that help with diagnoses, and then applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to create new measurement tools to help streamline some of those subjective processes.

“The better measurement we have for things that we can’t see for the human mind, the better the research questions, the better the results, and just overall the faster the community moves,” he added.

He’s also working on a project to develop a psychological assessment that could identify police officer candidates who are less likely to commit misconduct. The research has captured his interest, and he’s hoping, at the end of his five-year program, to transition into an academic research career himself.

“I think it takes a certain amount of creativity to be involved in research, to see what has already been put out there and figure out what’s missing. It’s really satisfying to sort of fit in those missing puzzle pieces. It requires a lot of problem-solving,” he said. “Being able to think of my field and come up with new solutions that nobody else has thought of before, I think it could be really rewarding.”

  1. Slide image with text reading '21% of adults in the U.S. experience mental illness'
  2. Slide image with text reading '54 million people in the U.S. experience mental illness'
  3. Slide image with text reading 'Fewer than half of adults and children with a mental health disorder receive treatment'
  4. Slide image with text reading '1 in 5 have a diagnosable mental health problem'
  5. Slide image with text reading '70% of Americans have better access to mental health care than those in South Bend-Elkhart region'
  6. Slide image with text reading '1500 more people in the South Bend-Elkhart region will be able to access mental health care'
  7. Slide image with text reading '1 in 3 adults with mental illness also experienced a substance use disorder in 2020'
  1. Slide image with text reading '21% of adults in the U.S. experience mental illness'
  2. Slide image with text reading '54 million people in the U.S. experience mental illness'
  3. Slide image with text reading 'Fewer than half of adults and children with a mental health disorder receive treatment'
  4. Slide image with text reading '1 in 5 have a diagnosable mental health problem'
  5. Slide image with text reading '70% of Americans have better access to mental health care than those in South Bend-Elkhart region'
  6. Slide image with text reading '1500 more people in the South Bend-Elkhart region will be able to access mental health care'
  7. Slide image with text reading '1 in 3 adults with mental illness also experienced a substance use disorder in 2020'

Wyman is one of 60 doctoral students in the psychology program, which also includes clinical science, developmental psychology, and cognition, brain, and behavior, but that number is about to grow with the development of the Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic.

The new clinic, scheduled to open in 2026 in South Bend’s East Bank neighborhood, will bring together faculty experts focused on developing innovative methods for the prevention and treatment of mental health issues, and on informing the practice of clinical care across the nation. The new clinic will unite existing work at Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families with new research on substance use and other developing areas, and it will foster collaboration among experts focused on evidence-based treatments to mental health issues.

“Our approach at this clinic will involve looking at the whole human—considering a person in context, looking at their whole family and their whole life—and how we can treat not just that condition, but really their life in context and in the context of their community,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters.

An artistic rendering of the new Veldman clinic
Sarah Mustillo looks over blueprints with a contractor. She's wearing a neon vest and gold helmet
A portrait of Sarah Mustillo

Sarah Mustillo, featured here, believes the new clinic will offer both research and service to improve the state of mental health care.

A key piece of the University’s Health and Well-Being Initiative, the clinic will increase the number of senior faculty in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology, triple the number of clinical psychology graduate students, and triple the experiential learning opportunities for undergraduate psychology majors. It will also include the installation of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which will significantly enhance the University’s neuroscience research across campus.

The result will be a clinic that provides both research and service to offer a robust, comprehensive approach to mental care and support that will make a difference on campus, in the community, and beyond.

“At Notre Dame, we are challenged and empowered every day to use our research to be a force for good in the world,” Mustillo said. “I am forever grateful for the opportunity the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic presents to us to help heal a world deeply in need.”

 

The clinic, once at full capacity, will serve more than 1,500 residents in the local area through mental health assessment, intervention, and prevention services. The clinic will also foster partnerships with community organizations to advance access to mental health care throughout the region.

Bob Raster, a local psychiatrist and 1988 Notre Dame alumnus, said, “One of the frustrations I’ve noticed in my 30 years of experience as a psychiatrist is that there’s never been enough providers for mental health. Frankly, we’ve never taken mental health very seriously in the United States of America. It’s a serious problem, and we need serious help.”

Raster explained that even when he can stabilize mentally ill patients in the hospital, once discharged, they’re often subject to abuse, housing instability, unemployment, substance abuse, and more. That makes them all the more likely to slip back into a mental health crisis, and back into the hospital. With more providers who can provide immediate care, he said, they may be able to better prevent the backslides.

“If we have more providers, that means we’re going to take care of more people. It’s about getting immediate care, because the need is there, and if you do it more quickly, then you get people less ill, and the chances of success are much higher for them to be able to function more effectively and to feel better, more quickly,” he said. “This is why I’m excited about what Notre Dame is doing with the partnership in the community to put more people out there in the mental health field to really help to manage the crisis better.”

The University of Notre Dame broke ground on the Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic in September 2024, and the facility is expected to open in 2026.

Notre Dame’s existing Psychological Services Center is currently at full capacity and looks forward to expanding its services in the future.

If you live in St. Joseph or Elkhart counties and are in need of immediate mental health or addiction services, contact Oaklawn at 800-282-0809 or via its online contact form. Anyone in the United States who is experiencing a mental health crisis of any kind can also reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

More information about the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology is available online.

What’s more, Mustillo sees the clinic’s reach extending far beyond South Bend, both by educating new clinicians and by disseminating evidence-based research.

“It will elevate the level of care across the community—not just the people that have access to our clinic, but the people that go to their local therapists,” she said. “We will provide training to the local therapists so they will have access to cutting-edge, evidence-based care that they might not have otherwise.”

Wyman echoed her sentiments. Notre Dame’s desire to share all that it learns, all that it creates, all that it has, is what brought him here in the first place.

“When I was looking for universities, what appealed most to me about Notre Dame was its Catholic mission. They are defined by the statement ‘here for each other and here for the world.’ Notre Dame had so many resources to support its own student body, but also was matched with the research and the passion to take the goodness that it created and give it to every corner of the world,” Wyman said. “I saw an opportunity to pursue mental health research that affected not just my peers, but also people in the corners of the earth that may not have access to mental health care.”

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  • Writer: Tara Hunt McMullen
  • Photographers: Matt Cashore and Barbara Johnston