From Medical Sociology to NIDA Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Yonette Thomas talks about her interest in social epidemiology and how it led her to NIDA.

I was sure I was going to medical school, and I was going to change the world through my medicine. I took this class in medical anthropology, and we were really pushed to think of how cultural perspectives and cultural context plays a role in people's health. And I ended up doing a very interesting project on medicine in the media and how ads on various pharmaceuticals give people the impression that you can take a pill, you can take Bayer Aspirin, you've got a pain, take Bayer, and you're out playing tennis in an hour.

And what does that say about people's sick role behavior and their perceptions of how they can take care of themselves? And that led me to do an honor's thesis, and then I started to think, "Maybe I don't want to go to medical school; maybe I want to learn a little more of this." And I did a little more anthropological theory as an undergraduate, and it wasn't rigorous enough.

Of course my father said, "Why don't you try sociology?" and I said, "No, I'm not interested in social theory. I don't like social theory." And he helped me find this thing called medical sociology.

And so I said, "Well, I'll still go to medical school, maybe I'll do that later," but I'd already been hooked. And so I ended up not going to medical school, but going to graduate school and focusing on medical sociology and demography. And that gave me this notion of rigorous measurement and design and that sort of thing, preparing me to be a researcher.

And in graduate school actually I took a class in social epidemiology that really, really got me hooked. So by the time I came out of graduate school, I was really thinking in those terms. So I ended up working for a consulting firm and they hired me because they had a project to evaluate the Comprehensive Child Development Program, which was a research demonstration program. Through that I was able to go to places like Marshalltown, Iowa; I really got a really good picture of the United States. And I wanted to get a feel from the ground up: "Who's an American?"

I did that actually for about seven years and continued being adjunct faculty, so I kept teaching so I won't lose that edge. And then I got recruited to a study at the National Academy of Sciences on drug control policy. It was a great opportunity to work with, literally, the cream of the crop in terms of a committee of people coming together to think about these issues. And we had a range of people, from economists to epidemiologists and policy people, you know the very top of their careers.

And so that really was my beginning focus on drug abuse research, and from that I got recruited to come to NIDA. And at the time I wasn't really sure that that's what I wanted to do, but people told me that it was a good thing, and so I said, "Well I'll try it for a few years." A few years has turned in to eight years. Shortly after I got to NIDA, I guess I brought the notion to, I was surprised that they had no concept of social epidemiology, so I remember one of my colleagues saying, "Well we study culture, drugs and culture." But then I said, "Well that's not social epidemiology; that's not understanding the interaction of the environment with individual behavior that leads to these outcomes." And so back in 2000 I had the first meeting at NIDA on the social epidemiology of drug abuse.

Shortly after arriving at NIDA I became the Branch Chief for the epidemiology group, and I'm happy to say that I was able to create a program area in social epidemiology of drug abuse at NIDA, in the epidemiology research branch, and just recently last year hired a full time staff person to pick up on the portfolio that I developed.