Coleman Yorke

About Coleman

Coleman Yorke was born and raised in New York City and stayed in his hometown for college, graduating from Columbia University in 2020 with a BA in English and a concentration in Psychology. As an undergraduate, he specialized in 19th-century Victorian literature and its connection to character formation using models of attachment theory. He went on to complete his graduate work at the University of Oxford as he read for an MSc in Clinical and Therapeutic Neuroscience, where he focused his dissertation projects on adolescent peer support programs and the effects of antidepressants on younger individuals. Although Coleman started out in investigative journalism, he decided to switch paths and embark upon a career in medicine and mental health education after witnessing the lack of mental healthcare support and educational resources for young people despite the prevalence of mental health disorders in this demographic. As an aspiring child and adolescent psychiatrist, Coleman is currently completing his medical school requirements through a premedical postbaccalaureate program at Bryn Mawr College. He cares deeply about young peoples’ emotional wellbeing and mental health and aims to spend his career instilling them with modes of resilience and coping skills while simultaneously destigmatizing mental health disorders and the preconceived notion that mental health concerns are not as valid as their somatic counterparts. Finding that much of the current information on mental health is not accessible to or geared toward adolescents, Coleman hopes to develop more widely available and relatable mental health and psychoeducational curricula alongside acting as a clinician in underserved areas in order to increase mental health literacy and support young people as they navigate this journey. In doing so, he aims for young people to find and have access to proper mental healthcare. He is also particularly interested in the role culture and varying community backgrounds play in young people’s perceptions of mental health and how that in turn affects the resources they are offered or seek out. In his spare time, Coleman loves to rock climb, read novels (especially those by Edith Wharton, Henry James, and George Eliot), wander around old libraries, go to trivia with his friends, and generally try to not take everything incredibly seriously at all times (so far it’s a work in progress, but he’s getting there).