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Collaborative grant funded by NIDILRR/Administration for Community Living

September 21, 2021

Collaborative grant “Up To Me: Erasing the Stigma of Mental Illness on College Campuses” has been funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR/Administration for Community Living).   Dr. Kristin Kosyluk, USF Department of Mental Health Law & Policy, is the PI and Computer Science and Engineering assistant professor Dr. Tempestt Neal is Co-I. Other collaborators are faculty at Temple University and the Illinois Institute of Technology.  

The three-year grant totaling $600k is focused on the Up To Me program. Up To Me is a three lesson, disclosure-based stigma reduction program meant to reduce barriers to community living and participation for college students with psychiatric disabilities. Anticipated outcomes of this project for college students include improvements in 1) self-stigma (self-esteem and self-efficacy), 2) empowerment and self-determination, 3) appraisals of stigma as a stressor, 4) student engagement on campus, 5) sense of campus belonging, and 6) care seeking/service engagement for mental illness. Dr. Neal’s group will investigate the use of sensor data collected from a smartphone app as a proxy of behavior to substantiate self-report data on outcomes. 

This award (90IFRE0056) is supported by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $600,000 with 100 percent funding by ACL/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by ACL/HHS, or the U.S. Government.