HCN News & Notes

Austen Riggs Center Announces Winners of Mental Health Media Prize

STOCKBRIDGE — The Austen Riggs Center announced the winners of its 2018 Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media: Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, and NPR’s Hidden Brain, hosted by social-science correspondent Shankar Vedantam.

The Austen Riggs Center Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media recognizes a select group of professional journalists, writers, and media professionals who create exemplary work that contributes to the public’s understanding of mental-health issues. Each prize carries an award of $3,000 and is presented at the center’s annual Fall Conference held in Stockbridge. This year’s conference, “Duality’s End: Computational Psychiatry and the Cognitive Science of Representation,” will be held on Sept. 28-30.

John Green is the award-winning, bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with David Levithan), and The Fault in Our Stars. He is a recipient of the Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and the Edgar Award, and was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. In his book Turtles All the Way Down, 16-year-old Aza confronts her roles as daughter, friend, and student while also living with her own troubling thoughts.

NPR’s Hidden Brain uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior. Hidden Brain began in 2012 as a regular series on NPR’s Morning Edition before launching as a podcast in 2015, then as a radio program in 2017. The show is now the number-one science podcast in the nation, and is heard on more than 200 public radio stations across the U.S.

Throughout his career, host Vedantam has been recognized with many journalism honors, including awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors, the South Asian Journalists Assoc., the Asian American Journalists Assoc., the Pennsylvania Newspaper Assoc., and the American Public Health Assoc.