Local residents create podcast on children’s mental health

QUINCY — “Scrambled: The Children’s Mental Health Podcast,” which covers the topic of children and mental health, was launched in September 2021 by co-hosts Chad Douglas and Nikki Shields, who wanted to start a conversation on the topic.

“Scrambled” has covered:

• the social stigma of talking about mental health symptoms
• the importance of our emotions, how anxiety works in the brain
• athe different types of anxiety disorders that children can experience including panic attacks, OCD, and generalized anxiety disorder.

Recent episodes focused on how these conditions impact family life and what parents, teachers and coaches can do to support kids in their lives who struggle with anxiety. Future episodes and seasons of “Scrambled” will address other childhood mental health conditions including depression, ADHD and the impact of trauma on childhood mental health.

The podcast’s focus came from personal experience.

Douglas’ son came to him at age 10, saying his brain felt “scrambled.”

“Feeling scrambled was his way of explaining to me what it felt to have anxiety. It made sense. There was so much going on inside his little head that nothing was making sense. His anxiousness would trigger a fight or flight response that caused him to appear very angry and disrespectful, even though what he was feeling was anxiety and fear,” Douglas said in a press release.

Douglas approached Shields, a pediatric behavioral health therapist and who grew up with childhood anxiety. Together, they outlined several episodes for a podcast.

“When kids and their support systems understand what is actually going on underneath anxiety and other mental health symptoms, real change is possible. With ‘Scrambled,’ we hope to provide parents, teachers, coaches and friends with information, tools and resources that will help them make sense of childhood mental health,” Shields said.

Scrambled is available on all major podcast platforms — Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Podbean, Stitcher and more. You can find the podcast on Facebook at @ScrambledPodcast and online at www.scrambledpodcast.com.