School Mental Health Conference Registration!

understanding minds. changing lives.

Registration is now open for the 6th Annual School Mental Health Conference themed Culturally Competent School Mental Health on October 16, 2018 at the Iowa Event Center in Des Moines, Iowa. Registration includes lunch and access to all workshops & presentations and partner exhibitions. This year we welcome two key note speakers, Jane Elliott and Dr. Michael Lindsey.  Ms. Elliott will be focusing on how racism impacts youth mental health while Dr. Lindsey will address how culturally competent school mental health fits into a school/district's safety plan. Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. over thirty years ago, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise. This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. Everyone who is exposed to Jane Elliott's work, be it through a lecture, workshop, or video, is dramatically affected by it. Dr. Michael A. Lindsey became Director of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research and Constance and Martin Silver Professor of Poverty Studies at NYU Silver School of Social Work in September 2016. Dr. Lindsey was previously an Associate Professor at NYU Silver. Prior to joining NYU Silver in 2014, Dr. Lindsey was an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and concurrently a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Maryland Department of Psychiatry’s Center for School Mental Health. Dr. Lindsey is a child and adolescent mental health services researcher, and is particularly interested in the prohibitive factors that lead to unmet mental health need among vulnerable youth with serious psychiatric illnesses, including depression. He has received research support from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to examine the social network influences on perceptual and actual barriers to mental health care among African American adolescent males with depression. He also received NIMH funding to develop and test a treatment engagement intervention that promotes access to and use of mental health services among depressed adolescents in school- and community-based treatment. Dr. Lindsey’s current research, funded by the Robin Hood Foundation and Annie E. Casey Foundation, involves the delivery of an innovative combination of interventions aimed decreasing PTSD and depression, and improving positive parenting skills, among child-welfare involved mothers with trauma-related disorders. A standing member of the National Advisory Council, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and a board member-at-large for the Society for Social Work and Research, Dr. Lindsey is also a member of the Ford Foundation Scholars Network on Masculinity and the Wellbeing of African American Males; the Emerging Scholars Interdisciplinary Network; and the Mental Health Education Integration Consortium. His published research has appeared in the American Journal of Men’s Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, Journal Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, Journal of Black Psychology, General Hospital Psychiatry, Prevention Science, Psychiatric Services, and in the journal Social Work. Dr. Lindsey is also on the editorial board of the journals Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research and Children and Schools. Early bird registration (until July 1st): $90 Regular registration (starting July 2nd no exceptions): $120 Preservice professional (college student): $30 Register here:  https://www.z2systems.com/np/clients/pleasepassthelove/event.jsp?event=18