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By creating an innovative health system and a new culture of health for the adolescent and young adult population, Stanford's Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing is creating a model for the country in how to better support our young people.


Fall 2021

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A moment of gratitude from the Center director


Greetings friends,


I want to thank all of you for the support of our youth, our families, our communities and our work together over the course of this past year. As we start to emerge from these years of isolation, grief and loss, I want to briefly share some thoughts of gratitude:


  • As difficult as this time has been, this painful pandemic period has led us to a local, state and national recognition of the need to support the mental health and wellbeing of our young people in an unprecedented fashion.
  • With the awareness of the need to support our youth, there is a growing understanding of the importance of listening to the wisdom of our young people and ensuring their voices and recommendations are at the core of youth mental health support.
  • With the recognition of the need for this stronger prioritization has come a renewed sense of community connection and coming together in all areas of our efforts to raise up young people and their families, whether in allcove center development, our media and mental health efforts, our partnerships on Native youth mental health or our other Center focus areas.
  • Our growing Center team has shown passion and creativity in all aspects of our work together, even under huge pressures and challenges, while sharing a tremendous spirit of teamwork, commitment and concern for each other.  


Thanks to all of you for the support of our youth, our families, our communities, and our work together. As we re-emerge over the next few months, may we all do so with a renewed sense of appreciation for our young people and the importance of creating opportunities for them to grow and lead us all into a healthier future.


Thank you!


Steven Adelsheim, MD

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Media and mental health

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#GoodforMEdia

Our youth-led peer mentoring platform, #GoodforMEdia, has been busy addressing the national conversation around social media and youth mental health.


Our team was ready to engage in the most recent dialogue around social media and youth mental health, providing insights from the lived experiences of youth as well as utilizing our platform as a helpful resource aimed at supporting young people in navigating both the positive and negative aspects of engaging with social media.


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What Parents Need to Know: GoodforMEdia’s Guide to Social Media

To support positive family collaboration around safe and healthy social media use, our youth leaders designed and created a quick guide for parents that highlights the key strengths and challenges that come with social media use. This guide also includes strategies and conversation starters for cultivating a positive relationship with their youth while families navigate how youth might best engage with social media in safe and positive ways. 

Learn more
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Media and Mental Health Initiative collaborates with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Psychiatric News

The Stanford Media and Mental Health Initiative has been partnering with the APA Psychiatric News to amplify and drive greater public education about mental health and suicide through proactive, sustained engagement with content producers in the news, entertainment, and social media. The three articles of the series were recently published:


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Speaking at the Kennedy's Forum annual "Our Words Matter" Conference

The Kennedy Forum invited the Stanford Media and Mental Health Initiative to participate in a national convening of journalism and media industry leaders to advance the need for journalists to create more thoughtful and accurate coverage of mental health and suicide in their stories.

Watch the recording

New team members

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Jon Updike, MD


Jon is a chief psychiatry resident in Stanford's General Adult Psychiatry Residency program and has helped provide clinical input into allcove's integrated stepped care model. During his medical and psychiatric training, he has worked to increase youth engagement and access to healthcare across Wyoming and California.

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Sinda Chun


Sinda recently joined the Center as the administrative and finance manager. She holds a Master of Public Health in health management and has over 10 years of experience in finance, project and program management in hospitals, education and nonprofit organizations.

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Catalina Popoviciu


Catalina is a visiting student researcher at Stanford under the Fulbright Fellowship. Catalina was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship by the Romanian – U.S Fulbright Commission to conduct research for one academic year (2021-2022) in the U.S. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational and cultural exchange program, creating connections in a complex and changing world. Catalina has a master's degree in Health Psychology, and currently is a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the University of Bucharest in Romania, where she studies the relationship between adolescent social media use and mental health. Her main research interests include the intersection of body image, eating disorders, and self-esteem and life satisfaction of adolescents and young adults. Catalina is also training in cognitive behavioral therapy.

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Raúl Poulsen, MD


Raúl is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist who joined our team this August. Raúl is the psychiatrist consultant for the allcove centers in San José and Palo Alto, spending one day per week at each center. In addition, he supports our school mental health efforts through his consultation weekly with the Palo Alto Unified School District. Raúl comes to our team with great experience as a trainer and educator, is leading groups at the allcove centers for young people, and will soon be supervising psychiatry trainees on site as well.  

Suicide prevention

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Alternate ending for “Romeo and Juliet”

This spring, the Stanford Center will be collaborating with San Mateo High School on an updated pilot of a teacher’s guide about William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Through five different socio-emotional learning modules, the pilot will challenge classrooms reading this timeless classic to critically analyze and discuss the missed opportunities to change the tragic ending of its main characters. The goal is to cultivate a more nuanced understanding of the increasingly dire straits of these Verona young adults, identify barriers to help-seeking behaviors, and encourage school communities to collaborate amongst one another in order to support youth as early as possible

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TEMPOS, a novel evaluation tool developed for preventing media-induced suicide contagion

To advance expert guidance on media reporting and portrayal of suicide and mental health, the Stanford Center partnered with the County of Santa Clara Behavioral Health Services Suicide Prevention team to develop a new evaluation tool called TEMPOS: Tool for Evaluating Media Portrayals of Suicide. TEMPOS is the first tool that enables media professionals, public health officials, researchers, and suicide prevention experts to assess adherence to the recommended guidelines for reporting on suicide with a user-friendly, standardized rating scale.

School mental health

Stanford Redwood City Sequoia School Mental Health Collaborative


The Stanford Redwood City Sequoia School Mental Health Collaborative, an initiative between our Stanford Center and the Graduate School of Education’s Gardner Center, is in its second year of implementation. Funded through a collaboration between Stanford University and Redwood City, this partnership expands clinical and systems consultation from our Center and capacity-building research efforts from the Gardner Center to build district capacity to support student mental health and wellbeing for districts in the Redwood City area. Developments include organizing a highly attended webinar for a safe school reopening for Redwood City School District staff and students over the summer, placing a clinical fellow at Roosevelt Middle School to provide on-site mental health support to high-need students, and working with Sequoia Union High School District’s new leadership team to implement a strategic plan for district-wide socio-emotional learning.

Southern San Mateo Youth Advisory Group


The first cohort of a new Youth Advisory Group based in Southern San Mateo County has had a busy fall since the group’s inception in July 2021, including working on a number of key events and initiatives focused on supporting youth mental health in the community:


  • Youth advisors led a September youth panel on the topic of intersectionality and mental health, where youth advisors shared lived experiences and stories on how their identities influence and impact their mental health.
  • Convening a student panel - “School Reopening and Mental Health” - to encourage youth to speak with other youth about their experiences and share resources and support.
  • Youth advisors are exploring with other community youth the possibility of developing an allcove center in the Southern San Mateo County region.
  • Creating and building CineWell, a youth-led movie club designed to discuss and unpack mental health representation in film, as well as convening a similar mental health book project.


This current Southern San Mateo Youth Advisory Group will continue through August 2022 and will be actively recruiting new members in January 2022. Check back in January @stanfordyouthmh or on our website for the application.

Native American mental health

Innovative pilot launched to advance Native American child and youth mental health and wellness


This past summer, the Stanford Center collaborated with the California Area Indian Health Service and several organizations across the state to successfully pilot an ECHO-model program focused on advancing the mental health and wellness of Native children and adolescents.

 

Beginning January 2022, the pilot will relaunch as a full program with two separate learning tracks:


  1. Native child and youth mental health providers working in urban and rural primary care and behavioral health settings.
  2. School-based mental health support for Native children and youth.
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New clinical partnership formed with United Indian Health Service


This fall, our Stanford Center and Stanford Health Care partnered with United Indian Health Services and Two Feathers Native American Family Services to start providing direct televideo child and adolescent psychiatry services for local Native American children and youth. This collaborative pilot in primary care-behavioral health integration provides a critical expansion of clinical mental health care for rural Native American communities of Northern California.

Native American Youth Mental Health Conference


On Nov. 17-19, the Stanford Center partnered with Two Feathers Native American Family Services and other state and tribal partners to hold the third annual Native American Youth Mental Health Conference. This year's virtual conference provided innovative insights, research and practices on Native American youth school and community mental health, focused on the theme of "Advancing community and school mental health practices with Native American Youth during turbulent times."

PEPPNET

Psychosis-Risk and Early Psychosis Program Network

Save the date


The Fourth National Conference on Advancing Early Psychosis Care in the United States: Harnessing Resiliency in a Changing World will be held virtually on March 10-11, 2022. Registration will open soon. Please complete the interest form to be notified when registration opens.

allcove centers development

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allcove San José and Palo Alto Youth Advisory Groups


Cohort four of the allcove San José and Palo Alto Youth Advisory Groups are off to a great start. Since beginning the program in August, youth advisors have provided significant feedback on all levels of allcove’s direction and development, such as decision making around the center's designs, sitting on staffing interview panels and sharing ideas for new workshops and programs. Youth advisors have also completed trainings in how to create a sense of belonging for peers in social situations, how to advocate for mental health, and how to understand and talk about suicide prevention. Starting in January youth advisors will begin their individual projects, where they choose a social justice cause and support it with the medium of their choice, whether it’s a zine, podcast or workshop. 

allcove program development


Work in the expansion of the allcove center network is speeding up as our Central allcove Team continues to support the County of Santa Clara Behavioral Services Department with service delivery and technical assistance for the two flagship centers, allcove San José and allcove Palo Alto.


Since the June opening of these first two centers, their youth advisors have been supporting each location's development from recruitment, marketing, community engagement and physical and service design of the centers. The center’s’ staff of partner agencies, which includes Stanford for psychiatry and primary care, have been working diligently to operationalize the complex work of service integration.


The Central allcove Team is also beginning implementation support with five additional California grantee sites. In partnership with the California Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission, the Central allcove Team continues to build relationships and collaboration with the leadership staff of the future centers to support center establishment planning for next year and to build the infrastructure to support the network of centers, including a common allcove website, data collection system, evaluation framework and the Learning Community. We continue to work with our national and international partners to integrate best practice in prevention and early intervention service delivery models in youth mental health. We are looking forward to getting to know our new center partners, their communities and supporting the incredible work they do to support youth. We also continue to work with several other coalitions interested in bringing allcove to their communities, including one in Santa Barbara that has extensively progressed planning. Interested communities can contact us at info@allcove.org to learn more about what it takes to open an allcove center.

Central allcove Team Youth Advisory Group


The Central allcove Team Youth Advisory Group launched early this fall. This group of young people is responsible for supporting the development of allcove centers across the state, providing a youth lens to development and implementation, supporting other youth advisors and developing local, state and national campaigns aimed at reducing stigma, encouraging help seeking behaviors, and increasing a healthy space for dialogue on youth mental health access.


While only active for three months, this team has already been involved with some amazing opportunities including:


  • Presenting to the California School-based Health Alliance on the importance of connecting allcove as a school linked partner.
  • Presenting at the California NAMI Multicultural Mental Health conference on the ACCESS project focused on creating inclusive and anti-racist policies for all allcove centers.
  • Serving on a panel at the Third Annual Native American Youth Mental Health Conference focused on exploring the strength of youth voice in developing mental health integrated care centers.


The Central allcove Team youth advisors are central to how allcove will develop in diverse communities and each member is committed to creating youth mental health access pathways, uplifting the youth community, and sharing their passion for mental health.

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Supported education and employment service in action


Since the opening of allcove San José and Palo Alto, Jules Villanueva-Castaño, the team's supported education and employment specialist, has been providing education and employment services in-person and virtually. Young people in Santa Clara County have been receiving support with understanding how to get a job, including building their resume, navigating the job interview and job search process. Additional services include support with college applications, finding in-person and virtual tutoring resources and helping them navigate academic planning. Connections and collaborative relationships are being built with local workforce development organizations as well as connections with local school districts and academic counseling offices through outreach efforts. Also launched this quarter was a series of financial literacy workshops, starting most recently with, “Understanding your credit report,” for young people and service providers in the community. 

allcove in the media


The opening of our first two allcove centers captured the attention of media, highlighting the youth voice and what makes the allcove model unique. Below is some of the recent coverage:


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We are hiring


The Stanford Center currently has an opening for clinical services and training manager, who would perform two key functions in service of the allcove network. First, this person would provide clinical youth mental health and youth-centered care expertise to ensure the quality and safety of a the allcove program across our network. Secondly, they would develop and implement training and knowledge mobilization systems and processes to support the successful implementation of allcove.


Apply today
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