ONTARIO — A $20 million statewide public mental health study official launched at Avita Health System on Friday, partly because local roots run deep for former Mansfield police Chief Ken Coontz.
Coontz, who left the city in 2021 to work for the City of Columbus, was in attendance for a ribbon cutting to kick off SOAR (State of Ohio Adversity & Resilience), a groundbreaking, innovative study that’s been two years in the making.
Coontz is assisting as a consultant on The Ohio State University-led project that plans to do a survey assessment into the mental health of 15,000 Ohioans in all 88 counties. It will also include in-person visits with 1,200 families at rural, suburban and urban sites across the state.
Coontz said he was speaking with the leaders of the new study, including Dr. Scott Langenecker, when he began telling them about the Mansfield community, where he served as a police officer for 25 years, including six as chief.
“My experiences here over 30 years … I’ve made a lot of deep-rooted connections here. I think that kind of registered with them when I talked about the Mansfield and Ontario communities.
“Dr. Langenecker decided, ‘It sounds like we need to to go to Mansfield and kick this program off here.’ That’s really how it kind of started,” said Coontz, who retired from the MPD in 2019 and worked as the human resources director for two years before going to Columbus.
“I think the study could have great ramifications for our future. There’s a lot we can learn from this and hopefully prevent a lot of the sorrow that a lot of our local families have experienced already,” Coontz said.
Langenecker, a professor and vice chair of research in psychiatry and behavioral health at OSU, said mental health services across the state need to improve.
“We have to care better for Ohioans. That doesn’t mean we haven’t been trying. We’ve been trying really hard. We’ve been trying so hard to help our folks here.
“SOAR is a humble recognition that we have a lot more to do. We’re so grateful to the governor and to our representatives here in the state of Ohio for being bold and leading,” Langenecker said.
“Part of the DNA of Ohio is to lead. And so thank you all for being a part of that and joining us here at this ribbon cutting at our first mobile SOAR site.”
He praised Coontz for his efforts.
“Ken, who many of you know in a different way, has been a real helpful guide in helping us to learn more about how we can be a good partner here in Richland County and the surrounding counties,” he said.
“SOAR is, for lack of a better word, a fact-finding mission. We are not about to change anything just yet. We want to listen. We want to learn. We want to learn with the tools that we have available to us. And we have better tools now than we’ve ever had before,” Langenecker said.
One of those tools is a mobile MRI unit that will be parked for the next three months on the west side of the Avita Ontario Hospital.
Grace Wentzel, deputy director of the SOAR project, said the hope is to attract about 500 people to the site from a 19-county area across north central Ohio.
“We can have up to six people from a family. And it’s however they define family. They do not have to be blood relatives. We would like to involve as many families as we can,” she said.
“Part of the project is doing imaging of the brain (with the MRI), looking at the functional structure of the brain while they’re doing cognitive tasks. But also looking at how the different areas function. And so that’s what we will be using.
“We will put folks in the scanner and then they will also have an EEG (and) a blood draw. They’ll do some neuropsychological assessments and answer some questionnaires,” Wentzel said.
Langenecker said it’s a “research MRI.”
“It’s actually a high fidelity instrument that helps us to understand brain connectivity, like how the brain’s neurons are wired together. It helps us understand how brain blood flow goes to different parts of the brain
“When we do different types of cognitive tasks or feel different emotions, we have the ability to do electrophysiology. We have the ability to do DNA testing,” Langenecker said.
“We can look at stress markers, we can look at questionnaires. We have the ability to do a deep dive into what mental health is for all of Ohioans.”
Families and individuals are invited to request participation by calling 614-688-9537 or by emailing SOARstudies@osumc.edu. Volunteers are eligible to receive up to $355 for participating in the study.
According to officials, Ohio has seen a rise in mental health problems, substance use disorders, suicide and other deaths related to drug overdose over the past decade.
On average, 427 Americans die daily from drug overdose and suicide, including 19 just in the state of Ohio.
At any given time, one of five Ohioans experience a mental-health challenge that negatively affects their day-to-day functioning, something that OSU ‘s Dr. Anthony King labeled “persistent distress.”
This study, according to King, is aimed at determining what works to reduce risk and helps to build resilience when hardship strikes.
Why, for example, do some people handle life’s stresses better than others and how can that knowledge be used in treatments?
Led by clinicians and researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine, in collaboration with several Ohio universities, the SOAR Study will investigate the role of biological, psychological, and social factors that underlie this epidemic.
Dr. Andy Thomas, the chief clinical officer at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, said Avita Health System has been a great partner in various programs, including an innovative “tele-stroke” program that can link local patients immediately to an on-call neurologist in Columbus.
“We really love working with facilities like Avita all over the state. Most people probably don’t realize that if you’ve been in Columbus and you see the large hospitals there, you think, ‘Well, everyone in Columbus must come to this hospital.’
“Only half of our admissions to Ohio State’s hospitals come from Franklin County. Another 16 percent come from the counties around fully. A third of all of our admissions in Columbus come from the rest of the state of Ohio.
“So they’re incredibly important partners here at Avita for us. And we look forward to not having just clinical interactions together, but in this case, research and education happening here at Avita in partnership with you,” Thomas said.
Avita Health System President/CEO Jerry Morasko thanked OSU for choosing to start its research in Ontario.
“Avita is in an affiliation with Ohio State. They don’t have ownership of us. We’re an independent health system, but we do a lot of stuff with Ohio State. They are a great partnr and we have a great relationship.
“It’s not a competitive relationship. They just jump in when we need some help of a big health system. They fill that mold for us. We’re honored to be the first stop of this tour.
“We were approached back in November and we immediately told Ohio State without any hesitation that we would be part of this study. I think it’ll be a great study for the state and for the country,” Morasko said.
(Below are photos from the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday afternoon at Avita Ontario Hospital.)
