Chicago’s mental health resources for young Black and brown men need an overhaul — and a group of them are researching how to do it
CHICAGO -- The collective trauma of seeing 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot to death on police body camera footage in March 2021 was not a new sensation for young Black and brown men on the city’s West Side.
But this time, researchers were watching. Researchers who knew just how they felt.
“That’s the lived experience that these young people are dealing with,” said Claudio Rivera, a pediatric psychologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University.
The research — presented recently at Lurie Children’s in the hopes of securing $20 million to foster youth-led strategies on community healing and bettering mental health in Chicago — was a collaborative effort between the hospital, Voices of
