Mar 6, 2026
Turning isolation into action
How Caterina LaRocca is reimagining care through occupational therapy
Caterina LaRocca, OTD, was drawn to VCU’s Occupational Therapy Department in the College of Health Professions for its relationship with the Children’s Museum of Richmond. After all, she wanted to work with children, and she wanted to make therapy tangible.
What she didn’t yet see for herself was a future in research.
“I don’t know how to do research. I don’t know how to write a grant,” she remembers thinking when she first heard about the dual OTD/Ph.D. option at VCU. It took a nudge from faculty – and a reframing of what doctoral training actually provides – to help her see that curiosity and passion were enough to begin.
Today, LaRocca is a Ph.D. student, a practicing pediatric occupational therapist, an adjunct instructor and a published journal author. Her work connects chronic pediatric illness, social isolation and the power of occupational therapy to intervene early, intentionally and systemically.
Research rooted in lived experience
Having already completed her OT degree, LaRocca now is focused on completing the Ph.D. in Health Related Sciences Program. She is focused on the passion that first propelled her toward a doctoral degree: pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
LaRocca, who lives with Crohn’s disease herself, has volunteered for more than a decade at an overnight camp for children with IBD and now directs its leadership program. There, she witnesses the same struggles repeat across generations.
“The kids at camp have the same experiences that I had 20 years ago,” she said. “That’s reflective of a huge gap in care.”
Medication has improved dramatically. Holistic psychosocial support has not.
Speaking from personal experience, LaRocca knows that children growing up with these conditions might ask for mental health support as they get older without ever receiving referrals. Adolescents transitioning from pediatric to adult care often experience increased hospitalizations and loss to follow-up. Age, not readiness, remains the primary factor determining transition timing.
For her dissertation, LaRocca plans to interview current pediatric patients and adults diagnosed in childhood to identify perceived gaps in care and unmet needs. She also will examine modifiable predictors of successful transition to adult care, including self-efficacy, disease knowledge, social support and quality of life.
If modifiable factors can be identified, providers can intervene earlier and more intentionally.
“It’s really important to integrate the patient’s voice into preferred care,” she said. “My personal experience isn’t an isolated case, and it’s not the worst-case scenario. That’s what feels most troubling.”
Expanding into the epidemic of social isolation and loneliness (SIL)
Two years ago, LaRocca took on an extra-credit assignment in a class in the Ph.D. in Health Related Sciences Program. For years, she’d been writing about IBD and related diseases through her OT program, and she saw this as an avenue to diversify her knowledge and understanding, opting to expand on an earlier paper about the role of OT in social isolation and loneliness (SIL).
At the time, she found less than 10 articles for a topic that the U.S. Surgeon General labeled an epidemic.
Social isolation, she explains, is objective – limited social contacts, infrequent interaction. Loneliness is subjective – the internal experience of feeling disconnected or lacking meaningful relationships. While distinct, they often intertwine.
What startled LaRocca as she dug into the literature was the severity of the health outcomes.
“It’s honestly deadly for a lot of people,” she said. “And it feels deeply concerning that it’s not being talked about or addressed in current education models or practice.”
Last fall, the paper was published as a Health Policy Perspectives column in the “American Journal of Occupational Therapy” titled “Social Isolation, Loneliness, and the Potential of Occupational Therapy as an Integrated Solution.”
Despite growing national recognition of SIL as a public health crisis, interventions remain fragmented. After describing the epidemic and analyzing the limits of current initiatives, LaRocca’s paper further outlines how occupational therapy could be integrated into broader solutions.
She argues that occupational therapists are already positioned to help, but they aren’t consistently empowered to do so.
Why occupational therapy?
Occupational therapy was born, in part, from mental health needs. After the World Wars, practitioners used activity-based interventions to support soldiers experiencing what was then called shell shock. At its core, the profession is about helping people participate meaningfully in daily life, starting with helping those soldiers get into daily health practices.
“Health management is more than taking medications on time,” LaRocca said. “It’s scheduling your own appointments, asking your doctors questions, keeping track of symptoms, advocating for accommodations, deciding when to disclose a diagnosis.”
The populations most at risk for social isolation – older adults, people with chronic illness or disability, individuals navigating mental health challenges – are the very patients occupational therapists already serve in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and outpatient clinics.
In practical terms, LaRocca envisions practitioners screening for loneliness during evaluations. From that comes opportunities to build peer connections alongside functional goals, such as designing group-based cooking sessions for patients adjusting to limb loss.
While the interventions are feasible, LaRocca notes that what’s missing is systemic support, including reimbursement models that make group-based services sustainable.
Her paper took nearly two years from first draft to publication, moving through peer review revisions and multiple resubmissions. The process was formative. “It was important for me to understand the back and forth,” she said. “That’s what makes peer-reviewed work reputable.”
Three minutes to make it matter
LaRocca brought that conviction to her recent presentation in VCU’s Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, which challenges graduate students to explain complex scholarship to non-experts.
While many of her peers presented completed studies and results, LaRocca stepped up and outlined her proposed research on improving the quality of life for those with pediatric IBD. In three minutes, she explained not only what she plans to study but why it matters to patients, providers and health systems. She came in third place.
For LaRocca, the exercise sharpened an essential skill – getting research into the hands of those who can use it. “It takes something like 17 years for evidence to make it into practice,” she said. “A lot of that is because the way it’s disseminated just isn’t digestible.”
In three minutes, she can explain why her work matters. In the years ahead, she hopes the health care system will listen and act.