HELPING KIDS COPE
A children’s book developed by the college’s Fine Arts students and Institute for Disaster Mental Health could apply to the current pandemic or any unfamiliar territory
Young Milo feels helpless, confused, angry and isolated. He is experiencing an unknown event. He’s wondering why everything and everybody is so different.
While it easily could be about the COVID-19 pandemic, the new children’s book, “An Unusual Situation,” is an open-ended tale that can apply to any dilemma that puts a child and parents in distress.
The book, a collaboration by SUNY New Paltz’s Institute for Disaster Mental Health (IDMH) and the School of Fine & Performing Arts, is a timely entry that helps children and families cope with unfamiliar and upsetting circumstances. It is available now as a free digital download in both English and Spanish at www.newpaltz. e du/ idmh/ media/ an-unusual situation-childrens- book and will be released in hard copy in a few weeks.
“We’re mostly distributing it to our partners that we’ve already been working with,” said Andrew O’Meara, an IDMH graduate assistant involved
in setting up the printing of the book and other behind-the-scenes work. “We are looking to distribute it to UNICEF USA, who we’ve been working with, as well as the Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico, possibly the Girl Scouts of America, the American Red Cross. We are planning to release some hard copies to them to get them to the public, into the hands that need them.”
“We’re hoping it can be used locally and globally,” said IDMH Director Amy Nitza, who has a friend reading it to her class in Oneonta next week.
“We definitely wanted the book to be a way to bring parents and children around the notion of how to cope during times of stress, during times of different disasters, and that’s also why it’s called ‘An Unusual Situation,’” O’Meara said, “so that the kids and families can kind of project whatever they’re currently experiencing onto the main character of the book. “
Milo is a nondescript bird living with a sister and parents. The stress of the unknown situation is making him physically ill and unable to sleep. His parents are stressed, too, and Milo worries that he is at fault. You never see him outside of the house which, viewed through a pandemic prism, reminds us of spending most of the past year isolated at home.
“Whatever the situation the kids are having, they can find themselves in this story and they can identify with how Milo’s feeling, identify with some of Milo’s strategies of coping so that they can feel less alone, hopefully, and it sort of normalizes or offers them some sort of universality about what they’re experiencing,” Nitza said.
“They can go from sad to angry and feel confused when you temporarily lose your ability to kind of regulate your emotions,” she noted. “That’s a really scary, sort of uncomfortable feeling, in and of itself.
“We know pretty solidly from research literature that kids for the most part have the ability to be resilient or can develop the ability to be resilient,” Nitza added. “To some extent, they’re at the mercy at how their caregivers are doing. They are looking to parents to know how bad this thing is. They are looking to parents to know how to talk about it or how to think about it, how to cope with it.”
The book was written by former Special Programs Manager Cassandre Surinon, who is now a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. Illustrators and designers from the School of Fine & Performing Arts were responsible for the look. David Folk did the illustrations and Max Zurlini, a New Paltz High student taking courses at the college, was the designer.
“We went through a process of trying to figure out which animal we should use as the character,” Nitza said of Milo’s origin. An early idea was a little crocodile, “We wanted to make it something really that was accessible. Most places have birds. The idea was we make this as globally applicable as possible.”
“We had been working with (UNICEF) pre-pandemic on supporting children in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria (fall 2017) and the series of earthquakes they had a couple of years ago,” O’Meara said. UNICEF inquired about a book specifically for children.
Surinon started writing after the pandemic had begun, and finished last May.
“We intentionally chose the wording and the images to make it as usable for any situation as possible, so we intentionally didn’t name what situation the characters are struggling with,” Nitza said.
“An Unusual Situation” is just a a small connection to the bigger work of the institute that James Halpern founded 17 years ago. Halpern oversaw its growth into a nationally-recognized hub for education and professional development in disaster mental health until he retired from SUNY New Paltz in May 2016 after 43 years with the university. Nitza took over in September of that year.
The institute works extensively with the Red Cross of New York, sending its interns there. The IDMH’s FEMA region includes New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It has trained 24,000 teachers in Puerto Rico.
“Our mission statement is to make sure that people who are survivors of disasters and traumatic events have the support that they need,” Nitza said. “We largely do that through training — training mental health providers in understanding the specifics of disaster and trauma work. We also train other people who work with disaster survivors to understand the mental health piece of the work.
“Under normal circumstance, normal meaning pre-COVID times, those were two sort of distinct populations that we worked with,” Nitza said. “In the current situation, everybody’s a survivor and everybody is a responder.”
“The pandemic has kind of thrown the world of disaster psychology for a loop as well,” O’Meara said. “This is a different type of disaster than a lot of us has experienced. In some ways, the experience of COVID has also been one of rewriting some of how we do the work of disaster mental health.”
“Our scope of how we work has really had to expand accordingly,” Nitza said. “This book was sort of one of the ways in which we were trying to get resources to people to help them support the people around them.”
The institute has applied for a grant through SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) to continue its efforts through the Boys and Girls Club.
“(It’s) along the same lines of the work we have been doing with UNICEF USA,” O’Meara said, “targeting it toward interventions for kids and caregivers, so we’re looking to run some training stuff down in Puerto Rico in the next couple of years, hopefully. That’s kind of our next thing on our plate.”