How Uzi Vert is Changing Mental Health for Millennials

I was working an early shift in the pediatric emergency department (ED) at my hospital. It was the kind of pristine morning that every ED physician cherishes — a few active patients, and an empty waiting room. One patient stood out — a 13 year-old named “Isaias”. The night before, Isaias was approached and physically assaulted by a group of teens in the Bronx. After being treated, he remained in our ED for hours until his guardian could pick him up for discharge. The young man appeared catatonic as he sat on the edge of the stretcher. His back was curved, his head hung low, and the backlight from a cracked iPhone screen made his facial bruises and freshly sutured lacerations look iridescent. He was mumbling to himself repeatedly in a tone barely audible above the music playing from his phone. As I approached the room, the murmurs grew clearer and more recognizable: “All my friends are dead, push me to the edge. All my friends are dead.”

For clinicians, there is an ever-increasing responsibility to identify behavioral health concerns as early and often as possible. Yet as the divide between members of vulnerable populations and the clinicians who care for them widens, the task of identifying mental illness has also become more enigmatic. The traditional PHQ-2 screen is inadequate and functions more like a faulty sieve. Without tools sensitive enough to…