Raising Mental Health Awareness and Raising JOY
By Detavious Hill
Just two years after its launch, the Raising Joy podcast has impacted thousands of listeners across the world. It is co-hosted by Cook Children’s employees Kristen Pyrc, M.D., Co-Director of Psychiatry and Wini King, Senior Vice President and Chief of Communications, Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity. The dynamic duo has recorded more than 75 episodes across four seasons of Raising Joy. Their conversations focus on mental health with special guests, leaving so much for listeners to take away from this Cook Children’s-supported podcast.
“At first, I thought to myself, ‘I am not the right person to co-host a podcast,’” said Dr. Pyrc. “But something changed when I sat down with Wini, and now I’ve learned through Raising Joy about not only my own mental health journey, but being more myself authentically.”
Originally crafted from the JOY Campaign (Just breathe, Open up, You matter), a suicide prevention initiative, the podcast serves as a way to address the youth mental health crisis. Each week, Raising Joy invites mental health professionals and advocates to share their expertise and stories around a given topic. So far, the podcast has covered topics around substance abuse, music as medicine, neurodiversity, and so much more.
“Any time we have younger people on the podcast to share their stories and/or advocacy is always so inspiring,” said Dr. Pyrc. “To see them doing well and making strides for positive change is one of my favorite things about Raising Joy.”
The hosts say Raising Joy often serves as a conversation starter between adults caring for or looking after children in their lives. The variety of topics covered on the show give more insight and tools to destigmatize mental health and have healthy conversations.
Kim Brown, Cook Children’s Director of Public Relations and Raising Joy Executive Producer said, “With Raising Joy, we’re creating a space for listeners to feel heard, seen, understood, welcome, and maybe (hopefully) inspired to take action so they feel empowered in their and their child’s mental wellbeing.”
Cook Children’s has backed and supported the efforts of Raising Joy since its launch in 2022.
“As a health care organization, it says a lot that a system as large as Cook Children’s loudly supports the mental wellbeing of its patients, families and employees,” Wini said. “This is an active way to address numbers impacting our communities, and through Raising Joy we are doing something to contribute to bringing down those numbers.”
New episodes of Raising Joy are uploaded every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.