“It came totally out of the blue,” Mueller says, sitting at her desk in her home near Griffy Lake, with one of her two cats, an elderly tabby, on her lap. She had no idea that she was in the running for the honor and still doesn’t know who suggested her name.

Her surprise only redoubled in October, shortly after Science News publicly announced her award, when her father noticed that Mueller had also received the Jon C. Graff, Ph.D., Prize. This prize goes to one of the top ten scientists who has the most proactive approach to informing the public about their research.

“It’s been a crazy year,” Mueller says. “I moved to Bloomington in June of 2019, and since then, I’ve been working on a book and doing lots of intensive data collection in Colorado.” In fact, she was in Colorado this spring when the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to abruptly abandon her car and apartment in Denver.

“I flew home on March 4, nervously disinfecting everything around me,” she says. Though she has not been able to return to Colorado yet, she has been conducting her research virtually.

“These days, I call my research Panopticon ethnography,” Mueller says, referring to the fact that as the only virtual attendee at many meetings, her face floats above the conference table, projected high onto a wall.

Mueller studies suicide among young people, especially “cluster suicides,” when several suicides occur close together in time and space. “So, not to be there with people in the moment is hard. Building those ties of trust when everything is online is more difficult,” she says.

Though suicide in the U.S. has increased 35 percent in the last 20 years and is now the second leading cause of death among people age 10 to 34, Mueller is one of the only sociologists to concentrate on the issue.

Suicide has traditionally been the domain of what Mueller calls the “psy” sciences: psychology and psychiatry. The few sociologists, most famously Émile Durkheim, who have written about suicide tend to consider it the result of social isolation. And government health agencies like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adopt much the same line, believing that social ties are always a beneficial counteractive.

Mueller has overturned that orthodoxy. As she explains, “my research really demonstrates how connectedness can actually become toxic, such that it gives rise to suicide and even repeating suicide clusters.”

As she asks, “Have you ever lived in a small town? Where everybody knows everybody and if you do something that’s just slightly outside of what’s considered acceptable, you get a whole heap of shame poured on you, and your private business becomes public?”

Though Mueller emphasizes that she doesn’t have all the answers, her research demonstrates that in tightly integrated, homogenous communities, intense social pressure to conform and to achieve, along with the stigma attached to seeking out mental health services, can contribute to youth suicide rates. 

Mueller’s current project looks at suicide in two highly-impacted Colorado school districts, with ten high schools between them. She is conducting the research with her long-time collaborator, Seth Abrutyn of the University of British Columbia, and a team of six graduate students. The schools pay nothing for her help because the project is funded by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Western Colorado Community Foundation.

The school districts sit at opposite ends of a state that lies squarely within what has become known as the Suicide Belt: Rocky Mountain states with unusually high suicide rates. The two districts had appealed to Mueller for help. When she arrived, she cautioned anxious school administrators, teachers, and counselors that “suicide is so complex and there is so little research about how to do sustainable and equitable suicide prevention in schools that I can’t promise solutions.” However, she adds, “I could also tell them that I will listen and we will design research together that meets their needs and meets my academic needs as a basic researcher.”

Her Colorado research has already uncovered a “massive gap in the literature: we are largely ignoring how schools work and what’s already on their plate,” Mueller says. She cites a high school principal who told her, “I’m responsible for stopping bullying. I’m responsible for sex education. I’m responsible for teaching kids about the harms of vaping. Oh, and I’m also supposed to get kids into a top college. And I’m supposed to offers tons of AP courses, but also remedial help.”

Thus, adding suicide prevention programs to a school’s responsibilities can feel overwhelming, especially at a time when the remote learning necessitated by the pandemic means that teachers no longer see their students in the classroom.

Although Mueller has never lost anyone to suicide, she has lost people that she loved at a young age, which makes her interested in grief and coping with loss. That interest, coupled with her concern over escalating suicide rates, drove her into “suicidology,” as her field is known. She calls herself a “data nerd,” who has always excelled at statistical analysis, but her current research also involves a lot of fieldwork as she talks to grieving family members and students who have been completely shattered by their loss.

“Suicide is terrifying for anyone,” Mueller says. “It’s terrifying for me. There are not many things that are more painful.” She admits that she sometimes wishes she had chosen an easier subject, laughingly proposing, for instance, “the effects of exposure to puppies.”

In the end, though, Mueller says, “I consider myself a public sociologist. It’s very important to me that my work actually make an impact on kids’ daily lives. I really love that I’m in the trenches on a daily basis, shadowing mental health workers and teachers, learning how they do their jobs, so that I can figure out ways that we can make it easier for them.” Mueller says that she’s also thrilled to be at IU Bloomington because it is a “hotbed of super-rigorous basic science research that can be applied to improve mental health and advance equity in education.”

Thrilled as she is to be back in Bloomington with her students, colleagues (and, of course, her cats), Mueller can’t wait to return to the trenches in Colorado one day.

Story by Julie Gray