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Many young patients and students are navigating extraordinary levels of fear and uncertainty right now. Whether their families have been rooted here for generations or arrived more recently, the current climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and heightened social polarization shows up in our classrooms, exam rooms, and counseling sessions. For many, including Indigenous peoples who’ve experienced ongoing erasure, Black families contending with systemic violence, and immigrant and refugee families whose "American dream" has become a source of terror, this type of violence is not new.
In this moment, we have an opportunity to serve as pillars of healing, steadiness, and hope. For clinic-based and school-based providers, this can look like expanding our clinical toolkit beyond individual coping strategies to include approaches rooted in community and collective resilience.
The following five anchors are grounded in the radical healing framework developed by Bryana H. French and colleagues. These anchors offer guidance and practical tools for consideration:
| | | Anchor | What it Means | How to put it into practice | | Critical Consciousness | Helping youth and their families understand their distress in the context of social, historical, and systemic inequities rather than as personal failure. | • Name the impact of racism, immigration stress, poverty, and discrimination.
• Validate fear, grief, and hypervigilance as understandable responses to real conditions.
• In clinical and educational spaces, validating these realities reduce internalized blame and fosters psychological safety.
American Academy of Pediatrics: Talking with Children and How to Talk to Children in Time of Crisis | | Cultural Authenticity & Self-Knowledge | Affirming cultural identity, lived experience, and ancestral traditions as sources of strength and healing. | • Invite families to share cultural practices that support well-being.
• Incorporate spirituality, storytelling, music, or community rituals when appropriate.
• Use culturally responsive screening tools and language.
• Optimize access to interpreters to ensure linguistic inclusivity.
Everybody Belongs Here: Inclusive Communication | | Collectivism | Recognizing that individual well-being is deeply connected to community, relationships, and sense of belonging. | • Connect youth to peer groups, mentors, and affinity spaces.
• Encourage family and community involvement in care plans including family preparedness plan
• Partner with trusted community organizations.
Everybody Belongs Here: Family Preparedness Resource | | Strength and Resistance | Supporting healthy forms of agency, advocacy, and finding purpose in response to injustices can challenge systems that produce harm while affirming individuals’ capacity to shape their environments. | • Validate youth who want to speak up, create, organize, or advocate.
• Support creative outlets (art, writing, storytelling, music).
• Encourage civic engagement and leadership opportunities when appropriate.
Tips on Validation: Interpersonal Effectiveness Handout: Validation | | Radical Hope | Sustaining belief in the possibility of a more just future through collective care and long-term support. | • Celebrate intentional practices of rest.
• Support mindful media consumption (including news, social media, and online content), which can amplify fear and distress.
• Encourage self-compassion and peer support.
• Check in with each other about burnout and moral distress. | | | |
A Note on Hope and Safety
Finally, sustaining radical hope amidst dire times requires intentional attention to rest, reflection, supervision, and mutual support among clinicians and educators. By modeling emotional honesty and sustainable engagement, we preserve our capacity to remain compassionate, effective, and ethically grounded over time. Our work is not only to support individual healing but also to ensure that our clinical spaces and classrooms serve as sanctuaries of safety and dignity.
These children are all of ours, and honoring that responsibility means refusing to become extensions of systems that cause harm while advocating for policies and practices that protect, affirm, and uplift the young people entrusted to our care.
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References
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French, B. H., Lewis, J. A., Mosley, D. V., Adames, H. Y., Chavez-Dueñas, N. Y., Chen, G. A., & Neville, H. A. (2020). Toward a Psychological Framework of Radical Healing in Communities of Color. The Counseling Psychologist, 48(1), 14-46.
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González, F. J. (2020). First World Problems and Gated Communities of the Mind: An Ethics of Place in Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89(4), 741–770.
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Have questions about specific patient case?
Connect with a child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychologist, or care coordinator today for a free consultation through Cal-MAP.org or by calling 1-800-253-2103
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