Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues impacting you. This week, here's Ryan Gorman. Thanks so much for joining us here on iHeartRadio Communities. I'm Ryan Gorman, and we have a few very important conversations lined up for you. In a bit, we'll talk to a
couple of great organizations for Mental Health Awareness Month. But right now, to get things started, let me bring in highway safety specialist Laura Dunn, who's with us to discuss the AD Council and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's hot
car death prevention campaign. Laura, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to come on the show, and first of all, give us a sense of the scope of the problem when it comes to hot car deaths here in the US each year, so unfortunately, an average of about thirty seven children die of heatstroken cars every year after being left or getting into a hot car, So during the summer months, that's about two children per week.
Since nineteen ninety eight, nearly nine hundred and seventy kids have died because they were easier left to a hot cat or they gained access to that car and then couldn't get out. You know, all of these deaths are preventable, so it's really something that we want to rease awareness of. Now. I'm assuming the majority of these debts are happening in southern states where it's the hottest during the summer, but this is something that can happen anywhere across the US.
Right. Yes, there unfortunately, have been heatstroke deaths in every state in the United States except for three. So this is something that everybody is susceptible to, and heatstroken cars can happen when it's only sixty degrees outside. In just ten minutes, a car can heat up by about twenty degrees and cracking a window or parking in the shade really does very little to help. Everyone can learn more about all of this at NHTSA dot gov slash heat Stroke.
Again, that's NHTSA dot gov slash heat Stroke. So what are some of the steps that have been taken in recent years, because I know there have been some safety measures that have been taken on the part of automakers to try to prevent these debts. Can you tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, automakers have started incorporating more backseat reminders, and I know our agency has evaluated several of those technological interventions, so we hope that that's something that continues to develop over the next several years to have several different safeguards in place to prevent these kind of fatalities. Is there a reason that's given more often than not as to why a child was left in a hot car. The priory way that hot car defts happen is from a parent or a caregiver
forgetting their child in a vehicle. And it's important for people to know the
most common factor in those deaths is a changing routine. So a parent taking a child to daycare or school who typically doesn't maybe there's a doctor's appointment, there's something else going on that day that kind of averts your attention from what you would normally be doing, and parents and caregivers get into that autopilot mode cognitively, where you're driving to work, you're thinking about things that you have to do, and during that trip, they just lose awareness that their child
is in the vehicle. Many times, these very young children in the back seat, you know, they tend to fall asleep and they're quiet, they're not making noise, and you know, unfortunately that is a common scenario in some of those forgotten cases. Now, something I didn't know about all of this. Apparently kids' bodies heat up faster than the bodies of adults, Is that right? They do. Kids bodies heat up at a rate about three to five times faster than an adults. They are less able to regulate their
thermoregulatory system. So those very young children newborn to five really are most susceptible to heatstroke. And that's why it's never safe to leave your child in a vehicle for any amount of time, now, even for a minute, because these events really do happen quickly. And you alluded to this earlier, but the rate of time it takes for cars, the inside of vehicles to reach temperatures that I think would surprise a lot of people. It happens very quickly.
It does so in just about ten minutes, the inside of a car can keet up by about twenty degrees. So, for example, it's an eighty degree day outside and ten twenty thirty forty minutes have passed. When an hour passes the inside of that vehicle is about one hundred and twenty three degrees So this is something that becomes a dangerous situation in a very short amount of
time for folks. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by highway safety specialist Laura Dunn here to talk about hot car debts, which are the leading cause of non
crash vehicle related fatalities for kids fourteen and younger. So tell us about this partnership between the NHTSA and the AD Council on preventing hot car debts ahead of these upcoming hot summer mon Well, we've titled this campaign never Happens because it's important for parents and caregivers to understand that this is something that can happen to them anadotally. We hear a lot from folks that would never happen to me. I'm a good parent. This only happens to bad parents, and that's
just something that's not true. We are all susceptible to this phenomenon. So this new campaign is called never Happens, and we want to remind parents that when they park that car to stop, look and lock. You'll be seeing those new advertisements very soon and you can do some safety measures behaviorally also to
try to prevent these events for your family and keep kids safe. Can you offer a few of those behavioral tips for us, because they are all kinds of little different things to help create reminders when especially when you change your routine something that you mentioned before, which is often a big part of why these tragedies happen. Right, So, when you park your car, always check
that back seat for your child before locking and leaving. When you're driving with your child, always make sure that your child has been dropped off at school, childcare center, wherever they're supposed to be. And sometimes parents set up a system with their childcare provider to have them the childcare center call them to say, oh, I haven't seen your child yet this morning. It is, you know, later than they would normally be here. Is everything okay?
Are they coming today? So that's an extra sort of safeguard that parents can set up to have, you know, an outside party call. Another tip is to keep an item in that vehicle, like the child's toy, and you put that toy up front with you when your child is in their car seat, so that's a visual queue to you that your child is still in the car. And often many people like to put something that they need
for the day in the back seat. A purse, a work bag, their phone, put that in the back seat with a child, so you have to open that back door and check for your child. Another thing that's important for this issue are when children get into vehicles and then they're not able to get out and to prevent that. You know, we always talk about how important it is to lock your car when you're parked, even if you're
at home and your driveway. Lock that car when you park, put your keys and key fobs up and out of reach, and always teach children that the car is never a safe place to play. It's not a play place. It's only for going places, because unfortunately, that's about a quarter of these desks when children access a vehicle and then they're unable to get out. And finally, what are some of the resources that you have for parents and
caregivers At NHTSA dot um slash heat stroke. We have statistics information about this issue. We have all of these prevention tips that we have talked about, and you can see our ads and get some more information there. Highway Safety specialist Laura Donn with us to talk about hot car deaths and how to prevent them. A big priority on the part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the ad Council. Again, you can learn more at NHTSA dot gov
slash heat stroke. Laura, thank you so much for the time and insight into all of this. We really appreciate it. Thank you. All right, I'm Ryan Gorman here on iHeartRadio Communities, and now let me bring in my next guest for Mental Health Awareness Month. I'm joined by doctor David Anderson, senior psychologist and vice president of Public Engagement and Education for the Childmind Institute.
You can learn more at Childmind dot org. Doctor Anderson, we thank you so much for ticket a few minutes to come on this show, and I want to start with a sense as to the mental health issues that we're seeing in this country as they relate to kids in particular. What can you tell us about the trend line. I mean, we were in the midst of a youth mental health crisis before the pandemic started, and it's only really
gotten worse. This is one of the reasons why the Surgeon General fears back put out advisory on the youth mental health crisis, and why so many organizations like us at the Child My Institute are trying to bring attention to these issues and the kinds of drivers that we see across the country as kind of worsening the mental health of children adolescents while also increasing the stress of their parents.
What is it that makes this a crisis? Is it just the amount of children across the country who are in need of some sort of mental health care? I mean, the real reason why we see in the crisis is we as a society have gotten a lot better at messaging around mental health and bringing down stigma, making it so that people are more aware of what depression looks like, what anxiety looks like, what ADHD looks like, what trauma exposure
looks like. And as we become more aware of the effects of those things, what we're also seeing is this huge gap between the people who could utilize mental health support and the amount of mental health support they're getting. So, in that sense, you know, the drivers of this crisis are that as people become more aware of the kind of support that they might need, they don't have access to providers. They don't see those providers covered by insurance.
We don't have enough providers. We especially don't have enough providers in rural areas or in areas where there's a high number of adverse childhood events. So really, what we're seeing is that this crisis keeps getting worse because as you get a population that is more and more aware of the help they need, but not seeing a societal movement toward getting that help, it becomes that much more stressful. Are there certain issues that are driving the depression and anxiety that we're
seeing in kids these days? Specific issues that you've been able to pinpoint that are part of this mental health crisis? Absolutely? So in general, you know, there's a wide variety of issues that drive the mental health crisis, and it's important to kind of think about that because all too often in media, what we're finding is that the argument around the youth mental health crisis is centered around sort of what's present in the societals like geist, like we're talking
a lot about tech, or we're talking a lot about social media. And to be clear, there's research showing that social media does worsen mental health for certain vulneral groups of youth. So for example, teams who are prone to depression, we're teams who're having body image issues. There's you know, very
solid research showing that social media can exacerbate those mental health struggles. But the issue that we have is as society, we tend to suggest that the most present thing in our mind must be the cause of the problems we're seeing, and in reality, there's a lot more nuanced to the argument. We're in the midst of an increase in pressure on this generation. We're seeing incredible kind
of increases in terms of achievement pressure and college admission. We're seeing a country that's grappling with a political divide, with racism and discrimination, with increasing income inequality, and with climate change. And we're seeing increased stress on our workforce and on parents that also is trickling down to kids. So, you know, what we want to be thinking about is how do all those factors combine to contribute to perhaps the worstening of mental health, and then also how do
we provide the care to meet it. You know, we're not seeing universal screening across schools, which could be really helpful in identifying kids who are at risk. We're not seeing prevention curricula across all schools where we teach kids the key mental health and wellness skills that could prevent mental health and learning disorders later.
And we're not seeing access to treatment. We're not seeing enough in school providers, we're not seeing enough telehealth, we're not seeing enough access to care
in rural areas, and we're not seeing enough providers just in general. So there's so much that can be done within this crisis around workforce development, around access to care, around providing you know, access to support for kids who might be at risk, or even for parents who might be experiencing extreme stress, or even the educators that are with our kids, you know much of the week. All of these things can be bettered and at the same time
we can tackle some of the big issues as society, including technology. I'm Ryan Gorman joined by doctor David Anderson, senior psychologist and Vice president of Public Engagement and Education for the Childmind Institute, which you can learn more about at childmind dot org. Can you give us an overview of the work that you do specifically at the Childmind Institute. Sure. So, the childmin Institute is focused on three major mission areas, and you know, it's exciting to kind
of talk about we're focused on care. So what that means is helping to develop the best models of evidence based care for different mental health and learning disorders that might affect children in adolescents, and then making sure that not only do kids get access to those services within our practices in New York and San Francisco, but also with schools and communities that we partner with to try to bring
those services at low cost to students and kids who most need them. The second major aspect of our work is science, so we focus on kind of
both long term and short term work in science. In the short term, we're working, for example, with the State of California on a project called Next Generation Digital Therapeutics, where our focus is on building out digital products that amplify the effects of therapy and help to arm educators or parents with the tools they need to improve the mental health of the students or the children in their
schools or homes. And then the long term kind of bet with our research is in thinking about how we help to do the research for the sort of breakthroughs of tomorrow, where we look for objective markers of mental health learning disorders and collect data on thousands of youth, where our focus is on collecting these
large data sets and then sharing them openly across the world. So the Chalman is too, we're about big data and open science, and we're really proud of the fact that by sharing all of our data, we've seen more articles published in our data by researchers across the world than even within our own house. And that's something we think can help us to make sure that scientific discovery
is made possible within our lifetime. And then the last piece that we really focus on, which I'll delve into a little bit deeper here, is on education. So we want to make free, evidence based information available to the village that surround our kids across the country and across the world, so that
they can help to support the mental health of their children and teens. And so what that means is we've built a website that has hundreds of articles for educators and for parents on all kinds of mental health topics and topics related to
mental health, and that's childmind dot org. And then we've also focused on programs that we've released across the country in partnership with the state of California and in partnership with organizations within the state of Ohio, where we're focused on making sure that we're scaling the kind of release of evidence based educational information and the
mental health across entire states and soon across the entire country. You released a series of free videos and also some other resources called Positive Parenting Thriving Kids.
Can you dive into that a bit? Absolutely so. Positive Parenting Thriving Kids is a resources development partnership with the Governor and first Partner of California as well as the Department of Health and Human Services in California, and our focus was in trying to think through the challenges the twenty first century parents face and in bringing as much expertise to bear in creating a lightlift curriculum that parents can access
and really utilize with their families. So we consulted thirty leading experts around the country. We did a survey of a thousand caregivers across California. We did focus groups with one hundred youth because I think it's really important as you're developing curricula that you also center the feedback you're getting on the voice of you to say, is this right? Is this what you want your parents and caregivers
and educators to know? And from that we distilled it down to about twenty key topics that we thought were most essential for parents and care givers to have information about in raising their kids and what that meant was. We created twenty videos in English, twenty videos in Spanish, along with tip sheets and a curated content library on childline dot org slash Positive Parenting where parents could access this for free see all the videos and access all the resources, and the topics
really range. They're across four categories, Rental, self care, and parent child relationships, Healthy child adolescent growth with topics like building self esteem and coping with stress, and building warm and positive relationships with a child or teen, Big changes and challenges like videos and tips focused just on the teenage years, or focused on having those tough talks with kids around sex, consent and safety,
or about healthy use of technology, or about alcohol and drugs. And then family and community stressors, how to really support kids who are experiencing or responding to racism and discrimination, community violence, a parent who has a mental
physical health concern or say death and grief for separation of divorce. And so we really focused in on this like heat topic list that we felt like was going to be most especially from all the expert feedback that we got, most relevant for parents and characters of today and making sure that they had bite sized, actionable practical strategies they could use with their families. I'm Ryan Gorman,
joined by doctor David Anderson, senior psychologists at the Child Mind Institute. You can learn more about the video series and resources we were just talking about at childmind dot org slash Positive Parenting. We talked about the challenges that kids face these days and some of the mental health issues that are resulting from all of that. But you also interact, like you've explained with parents. Can you
describe the pressures that parents are feeling these days. Yes, absolutely, I mean, we've watched these pressures just compound in the sense that because we live in a digital age, because we live in a twenty four hour news cycle, what we're watching is a parenting generation that's getting more and more messages about the right way to do things and the kinds of things they should be doing for their kids than any generation before it, and feeling like, because of
the accessibility of information the Internet age, the right answers must be out there, and that puts an incredible amount of pressure on parents. Parents who are working two or three jobs, parents who are trying to figure out how to get their kids to the right school parents who are trying to just answer general questions about, you know, how to support their kids at different developmental stages.
And that's really what we're here for, is trying to make sure that we create programs where if you're a busy parent and you know you've only got you know, five minutes in the evening time to yourself, where you might
be able to either watch a video or read a particular thing. It's this question of can we have that intervention moment where someone views a resource that we have and says, you know what, I'm going to tweak something for tomorrow at the breakfast table, I'm going to focus on this particular strategy, or when I'm getting my kid ready for school, I'm going to do this.
When my teenager seems to give me that attitude once again, this is going to be what I think about that might just help us to build a closer relation ship and help us to feel like we can maybe talk about a few of the tougher things again. And those are the moments that we really want to be there for parents. And finally, how can everyone listening support the work you're doing at the Childmind Institute, not just during mental health Awareness Month,
but all year round. Well that's exactly it is if for us, this is a twelve month long, twenty four hour a day thing, not just mental health Awareness Month, and we along with partners across the country within the nonprofit government you know, and corporate partner world, are all working to
kind of figure out how we solve these issues together. So really, if people want to be able to help us with this, it involves going on childmind dot org looking at different ways that you might be able to contribute to these efforts, to get involved, to spread these resources, to make sure that your family and your friends are aware of them, and importantly follow us on social media and check out our resources online on childmind dot org and on
YouTube. And if you can, please feel free to make a donation and on childline dot org to the work at the Childmind Institute. And this month all gifts are going to be matched three times to help the Childmind Institute continue to do the tremendous work this institute is doing. Doctor David Anderson, Senior psychologist and Vice president of Public Engagement and Education for the Childmind Institute. You can learn more at childmind dot org. Doctor Anderson, thank you so much
for taking a few minutes to come on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. All Right, I'm Ryan Gorman here on iHeartRadio Communities. And now let me bring in our final guests joining us for Mental Health Awareness Month. We have the President and CEO of Mental Health America, Schroeder Stribbling. You can learn more and support this organization at MHA National dot org. That's MHA National dot org. Schroder, thank you so
much for taking a few minutes to come on the show. And I'm really interested in this new data that you have. Mental Health America does an online screening program that takes a look all kinds of different things, and you've got some fascinating results on the state of the mental health crisis in this country.
You mind starting with some of the headlines from that survey. Yeah, well, thanks for having me, Ryan, and especially now, as you said, we just released some of this new data, as you may know, and it's especially good timing to do it during Mental Health Awareness months. As you know, we have a national prevention and screening program which is actually ten years old this year, and it is an online digital screening prevention program which
is free and anonymous for anyone who wants to take a screen. It has this past year, about six and a half million people went to the site to take one of our eleven different types of screens, and so that's how we get the information that we have in the report that we just released that gives us kind of a pulse point on the health and mental health of the country, and it's been enormously valuable over these ten years for trend identification and
especially valuable during the COVID years. So a couple of the high points from this year are that we remain concerned about the rates of people who are scoring at moderate to high risk for depressive disorders and for suicidal ideation in particular. Another thing that we saw was that there was a real skyrocketing and the number of people who were taking our screen for ADHD attention deficit or hyperactivity conditions.
So those are a couple of the highlights that we that are really standing out to us. The issue involving ADHD Q furious is that potentially something that has to do with just our shorter and shorter attention spans, in part driven by some of these social media consumption and tech consumption that especially younger people are dealing with these days. Well, that would be my theory. I think there are we're all trying to figure this out, and it's we're still in the
middle of whatever is happening to us. Yeah, something a worsening of our mental health across the board, you know, elevated levels of risk for all mental health conditions and with regard to the eighty eight however, you're what you just laid out would be my theory at present, or at least a leading contributor, because if you think about, you know, the amount of information that technology has enabled us to consume and respond to in a day, and
the changes to all of our thinking and thought processes and planning activities and coordination, it really is different. You know, I'm in my late fifties and I can tell you compared to what it was like to work when I was in my twenties, just the amount of information that we're processing every day, I think has a natural tendency to make us feel more distractable and have more difficulty with focus and concentration. So I think that's most likely the case.
And as you say, then there are parallels to what's going on with youth and technology that then get into the additional risks around social media and stuff. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by Schroeder Stribbling, President and CEO of Mental Health America. You can learn more and support the work this organization's doing for Mental Health Awareness Month at MHA National dot org. One thing I want to key in on from all of this data from your online screening program is LGBTQ plus
youth of color. They really seem to stand out among a group having a major mental health crisis right now. Yeah, well, you've zeroed in on the right thing in terms of priorities. As I mentioned earlier, everyone remains at elevated risk for depression and suicidal ideations, elevated from before the pandemic and on trend with where we've been headed for some years before that, including youth. If you drill down even farther, you find that those youths who are
at greatest risks are LGBTQ and bipock use youth of color. And that's because we know this because on the screening site there are optional demographics, so it is free and anonymous, and a screener can choose to tell us their demographics.
We know that these groups have some of the highest rates of suicidal ideas, and youth in general are telling us that they are having frequent suicidalized meaning most of the days or more than half of the days, which is alarming, and LGBTQ and use of Schollers come in highest amongst all of us. Now, more broadly speaking, beyond the online screening program that we've been talking about, can you give us a sense of some of the other work that
you do at Mental Health America? Delighted too. For one thing, Mental Health America has one hundred and forty three affiliate sites across the country, So there may be a Mental Health America in your area, and to find out if there's one in your neighborhood, you can go to our same site that you mentioned, m ASA National dot ord. Those affiliates are delivering direct services
which you're customized to meet the needs of their communities. Also at our national office, in addition to our prevention and screening program, we have other research, public education, in public policy, and state and level advocacy that we work on. The online screening program. The assessment that you were talking about earlier is that something that everyone can go online to MHA National dot org and
take or if they want to take it a second time. Is that something that everyone can do, because I think a lot of people listening right now might be interested in doing just that. Absolutely, put in a Mental Health America screening into Google and you will get right to it. It is free and it is anonymous. But to answer the other question, you can also create an account there and or you can return there without creating an account. You can go as many times as you want. You can crack your progress.
It's really you can get connected to other articles, the resources navigation to help from the screening site. So we encourage folks to please use it as a resource both to check in with yourself and then also to get connected to supports that you might want your need. President and CEO of Mental Health America Schroeder stribbling with us for Mental Health Awareness Month. Again. You can learn all about the work this organization does at MHA National dot org. That's MHA
National dot org. Schroder. I want to thank you so much for taking a few minutes to come on the show and for all the great work your organization is doing. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Ryan, all right, and that's going to do it for this edition of iHeartRadio Communities. As we wrap things up, want to offer a big thanks to all of our guests and of course to all of you for listening. I'm your host, Ryan Gorman. We'll talk to you again real soon.