Finding Purpose in Helping Adolescents

Note: This story talks about suicide.

“I have this awareness that there will be clients that I will not be able to help keep alive,” says Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH) student Kendra White. Yet, she continues, knowing that she has helped even one young person can counterbalance that loss.

Kendra is driven to help adolescents in crisis. At 14, she helped her best friend by calling emergency services and getting her the support she needed. When her friend was later released from the hospital, she told Kendra about the doctors, nurses and therapists who had supported her.

“And pretty much at that moment there, I decided I wanted to be one of those people,” she says.

A Lifelong Calling to Care

Kendra’s commitment to helping young people began in earnest while she was an undergraduate studying psychology. During that time, she volunteered on a suicide hotline, answering chats and texts, mostly from teenagers.

“I realized that I really like working with them. I find them to have a little bit more hope,” she says. “Being able to help someone in one of their lowest moments and get them to see that their life is worth living filled me with so much satisfaction and fulfillment.”

She then worked at PrairieCare Inpatient Hospital for three years. She keeps a binder full of thank-you letters from kids she helped that she reads on especially tough days: “It reminds me why I do this.”

But to serve them in more meaningful, lasting ways, Kendra knew she needed advanced training. She found what she was looking for in the Integrated Behavioral Health degree.

Diving into Research

Kendra was drawn to the IBH program because she could learn how to treat both suicidality and co-occurring disorders in young people. She was particularly interested in the connection between childhood maltreatment and adolescent suicide. To dive further into that subject, she took advantage of the program's research flexibility and partnered with faculty mentor Dr. Emily Jordan Jensen on a directed study project.

“There is a connection between childhood maltreatment and adolescent suicide that doesn't necessarily always include depression,” Kendra explains. Many of her young clients had early childhood trauma or abuse, but not all of them had depression. “That was something that I couldn't answer, and when I looked in the literature, I couldn't find an answer there either.”

She dug deeper into the topic and spoke about her findings and her literature review at the Minnesota Psychological Association conference in April 2025.

She found that not a lot of scholars want to research adolescents, “and they definitely don't want to research adolescent suicide. They're a very underserved population.”

Kendra also discovered that some of the conference attendees weren’t familiar with much of the data around adolescent suicide. There are a lot of misconceptions, including the idea that talking about suicide might lead someone to consider it.

“Just talking about it, actually, is one of the deterrents for suicide," she says. "And that's one of the reasons that I use language like suicide instead of a more softened term.” The conference, she continues, was “an incredible experience” that made her realize just how important it is to keep talking. 

Bridging a Gap in Mental Health

Kendra's research exploration has made her even more determined to improve the way that adolescents receive treatment for mental health and substance use disorders. Currently there are very few adolescent inpatient facilities in the state that treat both.

“Which is part of why I want to go into the field,” she says. “I want to bring substance use disorder treatment into a mental health inpatient setting. Inpatient facilities are meant as stabilization only. They are generally too short and do not necessarily always set them up to be able to go into a lower level of care. And the lower levels of care sometimes have up to a year-long waitlist.”

After graduation, Kendra plans to focus on making inpatient stays less traumatizing and more effective, so that there are fewer people returning once they leave.

“Those kids, they're my life,” Kendra says. “I absolutely adore every single one of them. Working with them just fulfills me in every possible way. It just drives me to continue.”

Internship Takeaway

Students in the master’s program complete at least one supervised internship as part of their degree. Kendra’s biggest takeaway from her first internship: “Adolescents are still children. They need just as much love and affection and care as children do. And sometimes being able to provide that when they may never have had it before is such a powerful thing to do.”

Advice for IBH Students

For prospective or incoming students looking to make the most of their graduate experience, Kendra offers this advice: 
“The program is what you make of it. So if you want to specialize in something, pick it early and pursue it. A lot of the projects are very open-ended, and you have a lot of flexibility with what you can study, and that freedom allows you to kind of pick whatever you want.

"You can do a lot in the program, including things like what I did, which was the directed study. There's a lot of opportunity to get more involved in the psychological community, but you have to be the one to take the initiative. That would probably be my biggest advice.”