Jillian Wiggins

Wiggins is an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and lives in Hillcrest. She will delve further into this topic at the TEDxSan Diego CommUNITY speaker series on Wednesday at the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre in La Jolla. Speakers start at 7 p.m. Right now, we are fighting for the future of our children’s mental health. The U.S. surgeon general has declared a youth mental health crisis, and this has only gotten worse with the pandemic.

1 INTRODUCTION The U.S. is currently in a youth mental health crisis, worsened by the pandemic and amplified for youth from historically marginalized communities (Stephenson, 2021; AAP-AACAP-CHA).

1 INTRODUCTION A fundamental methodologic principle of mental health fields is that the closer to “reality” the measurement of the construct, the better the utility of the model, for example, for decision-making (Ferguson et al., 2012). Both in neurodevelopmental frameworks of psychopathology and from a clinical perspective, the “reality” is that psychiatric phenomena do not fall neatly into categorical boxes as discrete entities.