Raising Awareness about Youth Resilience

GABRIELA LIVAS STEIN, Ph.D.

Gabriela Livas Stein is the chair and a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences.

Interviewed by Esther Robards-Forbes.

Tell us about your research focused on the experiences of marginalized youth from minority populations.
My lab focuses on community-engaged research that attempts to understand ways to promote positive developmental outcomes – taking into account the unique kinds of stressors that youth and families experience, such as immigration, discrimination or navigating multiple cultures. I’m also interested in how to increase access to mental health treatment and support the well-being of Latinx communities. We’ve been studying specifically how to promote parent engagement in mental health treatment, as well as how to deliver mental health services using community health workers.

Why is it important to study child psychology and youth mental health?
Right now, we’re in the midst of a mental health crisis, particularly a youth mental health crisis. We had seen rates of increased mental health distress in adolescents prior to the pandemic, but the pandemic has exacerbated this crisis. We know that when depressive and anxious symptoms become severe in adolescence these can lead to worse outcomes into adulthood. Given the crisis, we need to think about what we can do as a community to support youth in the development of adaptive coping skills and supporting familial resilience processes.

“It’s important to recognize how much teens have to contribute”

What have you learned as you’ve studied young people?
It’s important to recognize how much teens have to contribute – don’t underestimate them! They want to create meaningful lives, connect with others and do things that matter…It’s important for us to think about how to build a world in which they’re taken seriously, in which we give them ways to contribute meaningfully to conversations and social movements. Some of our most important social movements have been led by youth, and we see that advocacy continuing in a lot of areas right now.

What do you hope to accomplish here at UT?
I’m excited to partner with researchers from across the university to think around solutions for health equity and access, especially with mental health. … I want to think about how to translate our research to make a public impact, locally and nationally. The level of undergraduate research at UT is unique: we have an opportunity to train these future scientists but also involve them, in real time, in research that in many ways is about them. I think it’s important to create educational spaces where they’re able to take risks and where they’re able to connect with others and create opportunities to learn in different ways that they can contribute.

What do you wish people knew more about when it comes to the groups that you study?
A lot of times, science has painted diverse populations through a lens of risk, of what is going wrong. And that’s important to study, to give voice to human suffering and trauma. But…It’s also important to highlight the inherent ways in which families have thrived and found joy, and continue to do well. That can be a way to understand the richness of different communities…and all of the tremendous things that folks are doing right that other communities can learn from.