Integrative Neuroscience Student Launches Website to Share Mental Health Knowledge
Integrative Neuroscience student Anne Schauer poses with an MRI image of her brain she received through the master’s program. Photo courtesy of Anne Schauer
Integrative Neuroscience master’s student Anne Schauer was walking through Georgetown’s Red Square in November when she happened upon two students with a table and a sign: “Pitch your idea – win $1000.”
“I thought, ‘This is my chance to take initiative,’” Schauer said. She waited her turn in line and told the students, who were working on a class ethics project, about a vision she’d been cultivating for a long time: a website dedicated to educating people about developmental disabilities and mental health disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and dissociative identity disorder (DID).
She heard back not long afterward: She’d won! The students had decided to split the award money among multiple projects – but the $500 they offered Schauer was more than enough for her to bring her organization, Cognitively, into reality.
Schauer has already started an informative podcast on the Cognitively.org website, and plans to expand the site with workshops, research and resources for people facing mental health challenges as well as their families and the general public.
“I not only want to bridge a gap of understanding between psychology and neuroscience for people with the disorders themselves, but also with the professionals,” Schauer said. “I’ll have interviews with the professionals. I’ll have interviews with family members of people with the disorders. I’ll have interviews of people with the disorders themselves.”
Cognitively expands on Schauer’s academic interest in trauma-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and DID, and in the ways they overlap with ASD. Schauer hopes to pursue a Ph.D. and contribute to the academic literature while also sharing findings and experiences with the public at large.
She is motivated by personal experiences with mental health. She said she encountered “immense gaps in research and resources” that made it harder to learn about and care for herself and loved ones.
“Psychology often relies on behavioral observation, and I realized there is a pressing need to bridge this with neuroscience to truly understand and support people with complex mental health challenges,” Schauer said.
Learn more about Schauer’s work at Cognitively.org.