The focus of the RAD lab is to understand and alleviate the suffering of adolescents who are distressed, depressed, or despairing. While these mental health challenges cut across our society as a whole, we want to bring light to adolescents in our community and across this region that carry additional burden due to marginalization, discrimination and other systemic injustices.
While you often hear about a rising prevalence in teen mental health disorders, it can be difficult to understand what that truly means. Media stories occasionally use scare tactics to make the problem sound new, intense, and overwhelming. Scientific studies can sometimes seem dense and difficult to read, offering little information for the general public to use in understanding the problem more fully.
Here in the RAD Lab, we strongly encourage everyone to reach out and get help whenever you feel like your mental health is suffering. We often tell our participants, followers, fellow lab members, pretty much everyone we can find, “Don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional if you feel like your mental health is suffering.” We fully stick by this advice – it’s crucial to seek help for a number of reasons including: not letting the problem get worse, finding appropriate treatment, decreasing stigma associated with mental health care, and taking care of yourself.