‘Trauma Avengers’ a resource for youth struggling with mental health

A national network of behavioral health specialists led by UConn Health in Farmington, Connecticut, offers help for troubled teens through a series of videos starring peers from a high school theatre group.

The characters are known as the “Trauma Avengers,” who provide candid accounts of the challenges they face in their “Digital Diaries.” These video reenactments serve multiple audiences:

• They provide relatable and potentially inspiring content to help adolescents and young adults cope with their mental health struggles.
• They serve as a training resource for therapists who work with this population, along with more than 40 webinars created so far to address important moments in therapeutic interactions.
• They offer parents and families a perspective they otherwise might not have.

“These are young people who are avenging trauma,” says UConn Health clinical psychologist Julian Ford. “They’re not getting revenge. They’re not doing unto others what has been done to them. Instead, they are finding a way to create a path toward justice and they are advocating first for themselves. And once they begin to realize that they have worth, and that they deserve the kind of advocacy that we all want young people to have, then they actually shift their focus and begin to think about others as well, their friends, their family. And this really becomes a story, not of trauma, but of overcoming trauma.”

Ford and colleague Rocio Chang, the co-directors of the Center for Treatment of Developmental Trauma Disorders, explain the project in the August 2023 episode of the UConn Health Pulse podcast.

Ford won a federal grant in 2016 to establish the CTDTD at UConn Health in 2017. Today it is one of nearly 200 centers in the U.S. affiliated with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

The performers in the videos are from the Looking in Theater from the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, an interdistrict magnet high school in central Connecticut.