Christopher R. Larrison

Christopher R. Larrison, MSW, PhD is an Associate Professor in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Social Work. His research and teaching focus on the social determinants of and services for people with serious mental illness and co-morbid health conditions from a public health perspective. His agenda has been shaped by a transdisciplinary approach to research and collecting primary data in rural community-based settings from people receiving and providing services. Dr. Larrison is skilled in utilizing mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. He has studied community-based mental health services in the U.S., community development in rural Mexico, and the impact of welfare reform on health in Georgia. Dr. Larrison’s research has been funded by National Institute of Mental Health, the State of Georgia, and a number of foundations including the Center for Economic Progress and the Research Retirement Foundation. As well, several of his peer-reviewed articles have been placed on suggested reading lists by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Government Accounting Office, and The World Bank.

Dr. Larrison was recently reappointed to a second three year term as the mental health representative on the American Public Health Association (APHA) Action Board, which is the Association’s national level advocacy group. Dr. Larrison has also served as a grant reviewer for the National Institute of Mental Health for more than a decade when proposals involve studying community-based services and/or racial disparities in service outcomes. At University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Dr. Larrison is engaged in several activities that reflect his commitment to mental and public health. First, he has played a leadership role in UIUC’s efforts to achieve HIPAA compliance, the goal of which was to increase the extent and quality of health and mental health research on campus. Second he is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, which is rethinking how health and mental health research are conducted at UIUC. Third, he is a founding member of the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences, which, in part, is focused on developing new methods to understand the social determinants of health and mental health. Finally, he is a member of the UIUC World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center for Information Systems for Health, which is leveraging big data generated by social media to study health and mental health services and outcomes.

Dr. Larrison was the PI for a three year NIMH funded field project that is examining the relationship between organizational climate and treatment outcomes for African American adults receiving services at 12 community mental health agencies in the Upper Mississippi River Basin (1R34 MH074640-02A, Climate, diversity, and outcomes in rural mental health).