Toria Herd: Leveling up to a safer tomorrow: Psychopathology in America’s youth
The following story was written in April 2019 by Madison Sweezy in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, Toria Herd decided she needed to do something. A psychology student in New York State at the time, Herd turned to her studies to find the answer for a better America.
“I kept saying, ‘We need to understand better how somebody can go from typically developing to [developing a] mental illness where you are shooting up a school,’” Herd says. A friend responded with the answer: psychopathology, the study of mental disorders and mental health.
That was seven years ago. Now, in her third year as a PhD student in Virginia Tech’s psychology department, Herd is working with a group of students and professors to study how adolescents’ emotional development affects their psychopathology.
Herd’s advisor, Dr. Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health to follow up with 167 teenagers, now around the age of 18, in their fifth year of being studied. The tests themselves, typically in the form of video-game-esque activities, study risk-taking behaviors in the subjects. Herd is looking for a connection between environmental factors (such as parenting, peer relationships, and socioeconomic status) and certain risk-taking behaviors (like risky sex, substance use, and thrill seeking) and psychopathology in these young adults. The study also involves gathering information about the teenagers outside of the study, specifically their home lives.
“[We are looking at] what the parents are doing, what the climate looks like in that environment, how peers are involved in that,” says Herd.
The goal of the study, ultimately, is to determine what precedes the onset of mental illness and, eventually, to create a preventive solution.
“There is this phrase ‘cascading risk,’ which basically means if you don’t have good emotion regulation skills, you fall into this snowball effect of risk factors that can lead to some really tragic outcomes,” Herd says. “Suicide, substance abuse, depression, and so on can be the outcomes.”
While these examples are extreme, the reality of the situation is that some people, perhaps more than we would like to admit, do in fact end up in these situations.
“We want to make sure that teens don’t go to a place like that,” said Herd.
But no matter how many preventive steps are taken, teens will always be developing and, consequently, imperfect.
“They are engaging in these risk-taking behaviors and they make dumb decisions sometimes because they are teenagers, and that’s developmentally appropriate to some regard during this stage,” said Herd. “But sometimes those decisions can spiral into a path of maladjustment and that can lead to addiction behaviors or teen pregnancies or depression.”
This is where Herd and her team come in. Ultimately, the team is looking to create solutions.
“Instead of talking about how to deal with teen pregnancy, or instead of spending millions of dollars on mental health treatment, if there’s something we can do when they’re 5 or when they’re 7 that limits the possibility of that outcome, not only are we going to have teens and young adults who are better off, but also we can stop spending money to fix a problem after it’s already occurred,” says Herd.
“We’re studying people,” says Herd, of her study and of her field. “We’re a society that’s built around human behavior and we’re studying why people do certain things.”
And while our society is far from eradicating these behaviors in teenagers, or in anybody, Herd and her team and related studies are getting one step closer each day to a better, and safer, tomorrow.