'Parent University': Starting Safe Conversations About Youth Mental Health

All adults with young people in their lives are invited to join the Pulitzer Center on March 6, 2024, for a "parent university" about youth mental health and suicide prevention. 

Pulitzer Center grantees and hosts of the award-winning podcast series Conversations With Sydney—Micah Fink and Sydney Fink—will be joined by Dionne C. Monsanto, certified mental health first aid trainer and Chapter Leadership Council representative on the National Board for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, at Bard Early College High School in Queens, New York.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is requested. All attendees must sign in with their photo ID on the sixth floor of Bard Early College High School.

Through a panel conversation and small-group activity, this event aims to equip attendees to start conversations about mental health with the young people in their lives. Panelists will discuss their experiences navigating challenging topics, dispel myths about mental health, and share best practices on having intergenerational conversations.

Conversations With Sydney explains how young people are developing greater sensitivity to mental health and its diagnostic vocabulary. For many adults, however, there remains a stigma attached to topics like suicide, depression, and an anxiety of putting kids at risk in open discussion.

Conversations With Sydney is a six-part podcast framed as an intimate conversation between a father (Micah) and his nonbinary teenager (Sydney), designed to model safe, open discussion between caretakers and youth. The duo speaks with other teenagers, experts, and doctors. Broadcast by WBGO in May 2023, Conversations With Sydney has won two Signal Awards and received several other nominations. Pulitzer Center staff created a listening guide to accompany the podcast.

Panelists include:

• Micah Fink is the founder of Common Good Productions and an award-winning producer, director, and writer specializing in international affairs, public health, science, and the environment. He is also on the faculty at the graduate program in social documentary at the School Of Visual Arts in New York City.
• Sydney Fink is a teenage artist and musician living in New Jersey.
• Dionne C. Monsanto is a certified mental health first aid trainer and was one of the inaugural members of AFSP’s National Diversity Workgroup. She is also the former director of The Siwe Project, which promoted mental health awareness in the global Black diaspora.