Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Johns Hopkins psychologist Laura Murray about an

evidence-based mental health treatment she and others have been developing for 20 years to help

people who have experienced serious trauma. This unique concept has most recently been used in Ukraine

to help those who continue to feel the impact of the Russian invasion. Let's listen.

Laura Murray, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Stephanie. So you've been

working with mental health issues related to trauma for more than two decades. And I'm wondering

if you can tell me where a lot of this began. Yeah, it began very early in my career. Actually, when I was postdoc,

I responded to trauma, the 9-11 disasters in New York, and we had a mission to really roll out

evidence-based treatments for kids and their families. I've always been interested in all sorts of

mental and behavioral health issues. And that really got

me interested in thinking about how do we get more services out there that are very effective to more

people. Because often services are hard to come by unless you have money. Is that right?

Very hard to come by, Stephanie. Very hard to find services in general, but also even harder to find quality

services. So what we see in mental health care is if you have access to someone and very nice,

if your insurance might actually pay for that, lots of times folks that are licensed actually

don't have opportunities to be trained in evidence-based treatments.

So what we saw in New York City is we had all these licensed providers, but usually getting a

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