Mental Health & Wellness

Chris Schroeder, Recovery and Addiction Expert and Jill Brown, CEO of Generation Text Online provide professional learning to staff psychologists, counselors and social workers at Mount Sinai Hospital. This professional learning provides the research and data surrounding stress, trauma and addiction and equips health professionals with a philosophy and approach for mental, emotional and social wellness in order to live happy, healthy and successful lives. The Generation Text Online Framework provides a systemic structure to hospitals, school communities and community-based organizations in order for them to provide the support for young adults and adolescents with social and emotional intelligence and the opportunity to practice those skills in real-life, for real problems, real time.

This approach is designed for scalability and sustainability within any existing community.

How Generation Text Online aligns with Mt. Sinai Adolescent Center

• ALL kids deserve the right to be healthy and to learn how to maintain health and wellness
• Adolescents are at an age of transition. They are developing and adopting healthy or unhealthy behaviors based on their life situations this far
• Building a trust in a relationship with a health provider that can provide valuable insight into how all aspects of health are connected
• Providing a space for building trusted relationships by allowing them to open up and share
• Providing an opportunity to diagnose mental disorders
• Provide interventions for high-risk behaviors or negative coping strategies
• Best practices for creating a welcoming space and using technology to increase retention and engagement
• Provide a framework (blue print or road map) for specific needs

Benefits of adopting the Generation Text Online approach:

1. The impact of mental health and wellness provides life-long benefits.
2. Focused on adopting healthy behaviors
3. Providing the resources to healthcare providers, health care agencies, child welfare and juvenile justice systems, community groups, schools and families.
4. Seeking to understand before attempting to fix the problems.   directly from the young people themselves – what they need
5. Improving or expanding services/add new elements

How does a community support the mental health and wellness of their adolescents and young adults and at the same time meet them where they are at?

The Generation Text Online framework provides caring adults/mentors with a 21st Century approach that provides real-life emotional, social, and psychological skills, for real problems, in real time.

The Mental Health and Wellness framework provides mentors and adult leaders with the training to develop small groups where adolescents and young adults can build connectedness and a foundation built on trust. Leaders facilitate discussions and guide participants in social and emotional intelligence skills and mental health and wellness. Mentors/caring adults are trained in a 6-module framework and meet weekly with their small groups to focus on the needs of each participant. Effective mental health and wellness frameworks are flexible enough to meet each person where they are at.