Harvard's Samantha Wettje on "Mitigating the Negative Effects of ACES" with her 16 Strong Project.

Welcome back, we have reached episode #80 on the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast. You can watch this interview on YouTube here.    My name is Andrea Samadi,  I’m a former educator who created this podcast to bring the most current neuroscience and educational research, matched with social and emotional skills, with interviews from experts from all different fields, to bring awareness, ideas and strategies to our most pressing issues that we are facing, as educators, or parents, to keep all of us working at our highest levels of productivity. I’ve been interested in understanding why some people reach such high levels of achievement, and others don’t…since the late 1990s, and recent discoveries in neuroscience has accelerated our understanding of this.  I do appreciate the feedback I’ve received through social media. It helps me to know that these topics are helping to bring some new thoughts, ideas and hope when times have never been so uncertain.   Today we have Samantha Wettje, the Founder of the 16Strong Project[i], created in 2018 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  If you are in the field of education, you will have heard of the importance of understanding ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences that we did touch on with our last episode) and our next guest is on a serious mission to help our next generation of learners recognize and navigate the challenges they might be facing as a result of ACES in their life.   When I received an email from one of Samantha’s colleagues about her 16Strong Project, I remember exactly where I was, because it really is true that when you attach emotion to a memory, it’s something you don’t ever forget. When I read that Samantha had created this project in response to her experience of living with a mentally ill and addicted parent, I literally stopped what I was doing to read more. Is all I needed to see in the email was ACES[ii], (that we just spoke about with Eric Jensen on Episode #79[iii],  Harvard and Project…and I was writing an email back to find a time that we could speak so I could learn more about the 16Strong Project, and here we are.   Welcome Samantha, it truly is an honor to speak with you today. I do hope that we can use this platform to help more people learn about this incredible initiative you have created in response to one of the largest problems facing young people today.   Q1: Can you give some background as to why you started the 16Strong Project, and what does 16 Strong mean to you?   Q2: I felt connected to this project BEFORE we spoke on the phone because I had been thinking for quite some time that I needed to find someone that I could speak to on this podcast who had defied the odds that we hear associated with ACES. It’s not an easy topic to bring up with someone, so it was just an idea circled on chart paper on my wall. Find someone to talk about ACES. Eric Jensen opened the conversation in EPISODE #79, giving a brief overview of what ACES are, and the fact that a higher score predicts later life adversity. I know when you are launching a project, it might seem like the project is important to you but will the rest of the world agree. How did my response to your email give you more awareness about the importance and urgency of the 16Strong Project?   Q3: I follow the work of Dr. Daniel Amen[iv], probably one of the most famous psychiatrists and brain disorder specialists in the country. He has been working with Justin Bieber on his brain health, (he likes to call mental health brain health since when our brain works right, we work right—so his work is all around keeping our brain healthy). Something I found interesting from his work is that it is being “normal” is a myth. He says that “51% of us will have a mental health issue in our lifetime”[v] (post traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, addiction, eating disorder) just to name a few that are the most common issues he sees young people for. I know how important th