Dr. Byron Young is a psychiatrist, a lover of the arts, and a proud Black man; the work he does sits squarely at the intersections of mental health, education, creativity, and social and racial justice. He has learned — in clinic, in community, in years of watching young people navigate systems that were never designed with them in mind — that engagement is not a technique. It is a relationship. And relationships, real ones, require something most training programs never ask of us: the willingness to see another person as fully human, and to examine honestly the ways our own conditioning makes that harder than it should be. This Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) Seminar is about transitional age youth — young people between the ages of 16 and 25 navigating child welfare, mental health systems, and schools in a world that has already formed opinions about them before they walk through the door — and specifically about Black and brown youth, who are overrepresented in every one of these systems.

The seminar will be grounded in what Dr. Young calls the humanizing love tradition: a lineage running through Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Christopher Emdin, and many other thinkers rooted in social good — centered on a love ethos that is not sentiment but discipline, not charity but solidarity, and above all, a daily, active protection from the dehumanization that systems can quietly inflict. This presentation will look honestly at what gets in the way — systemic barriers, yes, but also our own biases, our burnout, the savior orientation that masquerades as care — and at what actually works: art, creativity, hip-hop, critical dialogue, and the radical act of seeing a young person wholly. Attendees will leave with practical tools, but more than that, Dr. Young hopes participants leave having asked themselves some harder questions — because that is where this work actually begins.