Kelsey Shoemaker
Co hosts Dr. Pyrc and Winni King on the set of the J.O.Y podcast
It has been almost a year since the team at Cook Children’s launched the JOY campaign, a program to help parents navigate the conversation around teen mental health that’s received grassroots attention across the nation.
Last year, an email listed the number of adolescent suicide attempts and jarringly showed 43 attempts in one month with the youngest being 4. These numbers had raised significantly since the pandemic hit, and the department knew they needed to do something impactful. One afternoon, they all met for coffee and began the process.
“It started with a brainstorming, whiteboard exercise, and we were all in,” Cook Children’s assistant vice president, Laura Van Hoosier, says. Somehow, we brainstormed these phrases: Just breathe, open up, you matter. We needed an acronym, and we looked back at the board — it still gives me chills — and it said JOY.”
It wasn’t long before the team collaborated on how to put the campaign into action and what needed to be done. The communications department began publishing one article every week that educated readers on suicide prevention. There are now more than 40 in-depth articles written. The campaign quickly became a grassroots movement among parents and the medical community, which led to appearances at public events, where someone from the campaign would speak about teen mental health.
“When we started, the numbers [of teen suicide attempts] were the worst they had ever been,” Cook Children’s media relations specialist, Kim Brown, says. “But, for months, we had been saying that every month had been the worst. It kept getting worse. Once we started, we realized there was a hunger for this information, and people were feeling and seeing it in their own kids. But no one was talking about it. Then, we were getting calls from the mayor of Dallas and all these groups across the state of Texas to talk [about teen suicide prevention and mental health]. It reached national attention, and we just kept it going.”
The team posted information about coping and conversation techniques from the hospital as well as personal stories from parents who had been through a loss. The number of people sending in personal stories was incredible and eventually, the team knew they needed to make a podcast to share these stories.
“It is very inspiring because you are talking to people who could have curled up in a corner and never come out,” podcast host and senior vice president at Cook Children’s, Wini King, says. “These are people who faced the pain and have taken it to a whole other level. These people have triumphed and become victors.”
Kelsey Shoemaker
Without knowledge of how to run a podcast, the team created an efficient schedule to streamline their podcast, titled JOY. Dr. Kristen Pyrc and King took on hosting duties due to Perch’s background as a child psychiatrist and King’s ability to ask the right questions. They teamed up to deliver a podcast every other week, recording two at a time.
“Some parents feel like they have to walk on eggshells. Or, if they’re in an uncomfortable situation, they’re afraid of getting it wrong, and they don’t know what to say,” Pyrc says. “[We educate parents on] ways to start that conversation and. Our goal is education and support and to [advocate for parents to] have those conversations. The campaign helped me; it helped quantify that. It was a real call to arms for all of Cook’s and the entire hospital system.”
Next, the JOY campaign hopes to receive more sponsorships to continue the podcast, educate parents, and tell more stories.
“I think about why we’re doing this in every single moment and every single episode,” King says. “[Every episode has] so much feeling and so much emotion and so much giving and transparency. Every single time we record, I think we did the right thing; it feels good. It’s been a slow burn in gaining traction, but I feel like this is absolutely the right thing to do.”
