Cierra Moore

During the strange summer of 2020, Cierra Moore worked with Dr. Kate Lovero on her work concerning trauma in Mozambican adolescents. Prior to this summer, Dr. Lovero and her team had traveled to Mozambique to collect data on traumatic experiences and depression faced by adolescents in Maputo City in efforts to investigate how best to implement integrated services for adolescents with depression. However, upon reviewing the data, there were interesting tangential findings on trauma, specifically the prevalence of traumatic events endorsed by the adolescents in the sample, associations between trauma and psychiatric sequelae, and the surprisingly low quantity of adolescents that were diagnosed with PTSD. Cierra’s work was situated within these areas of inquiry, which translated into compiling the necessary literature and contextualizing data to create the foundations of a paper on these trauma findings.

Throughout the summer, Cierra created and continuously added to an extensive literature review of mostly studies investigating trauma in adolescents in lower- and middle-income countries. Through constructing this review, Cierra was able to deepen her knowledge and provide insight to her research mentor on polyvictimization, mental disorders associated with childhood trauma, and cultural behaviors that may inform different expressions of PTSD. Using past literature as a guide, Cierra was able to assist her mentor in developing key aspects of the paper, such as the groupings of traumatic experiences, defining polyvictimization, and contextualizing data for the prevalence of individual traumatic experiences. Cierra enjoyed working with her mentor immensely and is very grateful for the skills in research and analysis that she has learned from her work on this project.

Outside of the research project, however, there were also innumerable resources that Cierra took away from this program. She loved connecting with an amazing and diverse array of mental health professionals that just may have recruited her to the public health side of mental health care. She also appreciated the incredibly useful talks about breaking into the post-graduation world of graduate studies and careers, which have convinced her to update her LinkedIn. At the end of her GMHP internship journey, yet only the beginning of her relationship with GMHP, Cierra couldn’t thank the program and all who were involved enough! It has truly expanded her view of what mental health care can look like and has made her even more excited about her future in the field.