- Engaging Depressed African American Adolescents in Treatment: Lessons From The AAKOMA PROJECT (Breland-Noble et al., 2010)
- This article mentions solutions to engaging this demographic of adolescents, with one idea being a "drop-in" style opportunity in various community centers. This seems like an effective idea given some of the conclusions the authors in the article drew, specifically in relation to the teens mentioning that they see depression as "having issues" or just going through a hard time. There is an acknowledgment of how some individuals benefit from having a label to what they are experiencing. For some African American adolescents who have a thought process similar to what I communicated above, the label of depression may do more harm than good.
- TEDx - How Do We Stop Childhood Adversity from Becoming a Life Sentence (Benjamin Perks)
- I appreciated Benjamin Perks thoughtfulness in the solutions he proposed to help mitigate the intensity of childhood ACEs. I wonder what it would look like to have a child protection system that resembles all that he mentioned; screening services from prenatal to adolescent healthcare visits, opportunities to place children in foster care when their living environment proves to be unsuitable, a trauma-informed education system, just to name a few. These seem like logical ideas, so I doubt Mr. Perks is the first person to come up with them. That leaves me to wonder about the systems in place that prevent these things from happening. I imagine it has something to do with the training and implementation of equipping leaders in these fields to be able to administer effective care. I wonder where one starts if the end goals are some of the solutions Mr. Perks mentioned. Do you start with enhancing curriculum at the higher education level for human service leaders in training, then train the institutions they are working for in the same model? Do you start with increasing the pay for social workers so that more individuals can enter the field, reduce burnout, and therefore have a more effective standard of care? Part of me believes that the debate about where to start leaves leaders in analysis paralysis, and therefore nothing gets done. Another part of me (a more cynical, although I feel realistic version of me) believes that there are leaders in the system who don't truly want things to change.