Mind and Matter: Healing and Mental Health in a Conflict-Driven World

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Join the Pulitzer Center on May 16, 2024, for a special Mental Health Action Day webinar. Reporting Fellows will speak about reporting mental health crises in populations displaced by conflict in South Sudan and Ukraine, as well as a burgeoning psychiatry program in Sierra Leone.

Topics include reporting about mental health in vulnerable communities, how to start discussions of mental health in places where talking about it is uncommon or considered taboo, and mental health as a factor in physical well-being. Campus Consortium and Outreach Program Coordinator Ethan Widlansky will moderate the discussion. 

Registration is required. 

Panelists include: 

• Emanuella Evans is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her reporting focuses on institutional injustices present in the criminal system, housing, transportation, and higher education. Her Pulitzer Center-supported project, The War After the War, explores South Sudanese youth in the U.S. diaspora navigating questions about generational trauma and healing in a culture that can stigmatize mental health. 
• Diana Rayes is a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of International Health. Her research focuses on the impact of conflict and displacement on refugee mental health and integration in host country contexts, and particularly in high-income settings. Her Pulitzer Center-supported project, Ukrainian Refugees in Turkey: Displacement Impact on Mental Health, highlights the mental health and psychosocial needs of recently displaced Ukrainians who are in transit to Turkey. 
• Blessed Sheriff is a fifth-year medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her work investigates how open conversations about mental health are transforming patients' lives around the world. Her Pulitzer Center-supported project, Mind Over Matter: Inside the Movement to Transform Mental Health in Sierra Leone, documents the first class of psychiatry residents trained in Sierra Leone.