Dr. Burton’s mission is to increase mental health literacy and help-seeking amongst BIPOC high school students in under-resourced communities in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) through a peer-led mental health literacy intervention. This project builds on a recently developed community-academic partnership between UCLA Psychiatry and the Los Angeles Trust for Children (The Trust), a community agency that supports peer-to-peer health education programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). For our project, we have adapted an existing evidence-based high school mental health literacy curriculum, the Mental Health & High School Curriculum Guide for use in a peer-led mental health intervention aimed to improve students’ mental health knowledge, attitudes towards mental health, and help-seeking behaviors. Our approach to implementing a peer-led model for the intervention utilizes the L.A. Trust’s existing peer-based student health and wellness intervention, the Student Advisory Board. The Student Advisory Board exists across ten LAUSD schools in predominantly under-resourced communities. The Student Advisory Board is comprised of six to ten selected high school students from each LAUSD school. The student advisory board members serve as health student advocates for their respective schools. Our mental health intervention provides the Student Advisory Board members with formalized training and supervision on mental health literacy. This formal mental health training prepares the student peer leaders to take on a supportive and educational role with similar-aged pupils in their school through mental health promotion interventions, such as tabling events, flyers, social media campaigns, etc. The program empowers school communities from within by allowing the students themselves to be advocates and voices for students' needs. The mental health trainings are delivered by UCLA Psychiatry resident physicians and medical students, who serve as co-leaders during interactive small group break out discussions. The project is purposed to strengthen the department’s core mission of health equity, diversity and inclusion by providing increased opportunity for community outreach and engagement for trainees in the Department of Psychiatry, while addressing a large unmet need for mental health awareness and education in Los Angeles BIPOC communities.

Frederick Burton III, MD is a dedicated resident physician specializing in Psychiatry at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he serves as one of the Chiefs of Healthcare Administration/System Improvement. Dr. Burton completed his medical degree at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine and holds a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience and Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from The University of Rochester. His clinical interests include Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and he is actively involved in healthcare administration, quality improvement, and looking to increase the accessibility to mental health services.