Clinical psychologists often narrow in on just one topic for their research. But the life experiences researchers study don’t always occur separately in the real world.
“Labs will study addiction, or they'll study suicide,” said Melissa Nance, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. “In clinical practice, it's a lot messier than that. People do all of these things together, and there are a lot of connections between them.”
Nance, a fifth-year graduate student, recently won a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in support of her forthcoming study of alcohol use and self-harm in young adults, connecting two often isolated fields.
The grant will allow Nance to conduct research, support her professional development, and prepare her for a successful career built on original and impactful work.
“These are often treated as very separate research areas, addiction versus some of these other mental health topics,” Nance said. “Can we integrate them a little bit better? What do we know about alcohol and addiction that could help people who want to stop self-harming, or what do we know about self-harm that could help people who are struggling with addiction?”
Designing studies to understand coping mechanisms
As an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nance worked in a research lab focused on anxiety, and she became interested in how people used alcohol to cope. While at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, she focused her graduate thesis on women engaging in self-harm, and she once again found a connection to alcohol use.
Nance’s new project, “Combining ecological momentary assessment and qualitative methods to construct a theoretical model of acute alcohol use and non-suicidal self-injury,” will explore the relationship between alcohol use and non-suicidal injury in a national sample of 18- to 25-year-olds — an age group with comparatively high rates of the behavior.
“There's been a lot of good education to clinicians and the general public about risks of alcohol use related to suicide, and less so around that for non-suicidal self-injury, which is actually pretty common among college students and young adults,” she said.
Nance plans to use a mixed-method approach, collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. To start, she and her team will speak with each participant about their experiences. The interviews will help characterize the relationship between alcohol use and self-harm.
“And the goal is to allow participants to tell me in their own words what happens when they drink and self-harm, so we can generate some hypotheses and some mechanisms,” Nance said. “Does alcohol make them more impulsive? Or does it make them feel like the self-harm won't hurt as bad? Or does it do something else?”
Nance will then use a methodology called ecological momentary assessment to capture in-the-moment feedback whenever participants drink and self-harm over the 21-day study.
“We have people fill out short surveys on their phones when they're actually engaging in the behaviors we're interested in, so that they can tell us what their mood is like, what's going on in their environment, and so forth. We can use this real-time information to test our theories from the interviews about how alcohol use leads to self-harm,” she said.
Prioritizing mentorship and professional growth
The project allows Nance to grow more adept in a variety of qualitative and quantitative skills, preparing her for a career in clinical psychology research in a university setting.
At Notre Dame, Laura Miller-Graff, a professor of psychology and director of the Shaw Center for Children and Families, will provide expertise on qualitative work, and professor Lijua (Peggy) Wang will help advise on statistical analysis. Nance will also rely on assistant professor Ryan Carpenter’s mentorship as part of the Studying Processes in Everyday Life (SPIEL) Lab, which leads a number of studies focused on emotion regulation and negative reinforcement processes.
“Having people in the clinical program who were immediately ready to be mentors and share materials was immensely helpful in the process. As well as everything about how well-situated Notre Dame is to support my research.”
- Melissa Nance, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology
Nance arrived at Notre Dame during the course of her graduate studies, when Carpenter brought the SPIEL Lab to the University in 2024. Despite moving in the middle of the NIH grant resubmission process, Nance found that the psychology department was equipped to support her research.
“Having people in the clinical program who were immediately ready to be mentors and share materials was immensely helpful in the process,” Nance said, “As well as everything about how well-situated Notre Dame is to support my research.”
Nance hopes that her research sparks broader change by bridging research on substance use with other mental health topics and prompting better public health education around these topics.
“I do hope it's going to have good treatment implications, to be able to help us think about both training clinicians — what they should be looking out for that could be a risk factor for self-harm — as well as just educating young people about why they might want to modify their behaviors,” Nance said. “Even if they are self-harming, to mitigate some of the risks of it, so that they're not self-harming so severely where it could lead to them needing medical intervention.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on October 28, 2025.