Young Innovator in Behavioral Health Awardee

My mom inspires me with the infinite amount of love she shows me everyday. Striving to make her proud gives me purpose, and as a future mental health practitioner, it serves as a potent reminder of how important social support is for mental health

Though strides have been made in making mental health a more mainstream topic in the Western context, I believe that destigmatization is merely the first step. I hope mental health care evolves to embrace the adage that the political is personal. That clinicians have a duty to call out political assaults on trans and gender diverse youth based on medical misinformation. That the status quo of mental health care is woefully narrow in its geographic scale such that a PTSD diagnosis originally designed for combat veterans is egregiously inadequate to describe the emotional state of Gazan children living amidst ongoing trauma, for example.

My superpower is my ability to draw upon and candidly talk about my own experience with mental illness as a means of fostering empathy, especially for those occupying a marginalized status in society and thus who may not have the luxury of visibility.