By Shirley Shuman
Last Saturday night, 2018 Braxton County High graduate Hannah Moore Keener made a TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talk to an audience of approximately 400, “the biggest TED audience Marshall University has had.” A third-year student in Marshall’s doctoral clinical psychology program, Moore-Keener explained how she arrived at the point of making the talk and why she wanted to do it.
“Marshall Univer-sity’s TEDx organization issued a call for students to propose a talk. I’ve always loved TED talks and saw it as an opportunity to promote mental health so I submitted a proposal,” she said. “They accepted my proposal, and I was next invited to a live pitch that was accepted, too. I was one of two speakers selected to be part of the event.”
Moore-Keener continued to say that TED talks have been “a platform for sharing information through storytelling” and added, “I was trying to share some of my clinical psychology information through personal stories. I wanted eventually to share the scientific perspective on mind-body connection through first trying to give personal examples.”
A supervised psychologist at Cabell Midland Hospital Community Center, Moore noted that she “did not want to tell stories about clients at the Community Center as that would be an invasion of privacy.” Instead, she said, “I decided to share stories about me and [my husband] Colton and really talk about the connection between mental and physical health.”
One of her examples showed her anemia, a physical condition, “taking a toll on [her] mental health.” In her TED talk, she discussed how her mental health suffered as she dealt with her physical problem. To show the opposite effect, she talked about her husband Colton’s emotional stress contributing negatively to his physical condition. “I really wanted to highlight an advocacy for integrated health and adapt a mandate that destigmatizes mental health in order to improve both physical and mental well-being.” Moore-Keener plans a career in clinical psychology in which she will work primarily with people for applied psychological evaluations and psychological therapy.
Saturday night’s TED talk was the Braxton native’s first-ever public speaking engagement. “I had never had a Public Speaking class and I had never spoken publicly before,” she noted. She was determined, however, to deliver the talk, and the result was positive. Explaining what the experience meant to her, she said, “It was the scariest thing I have ever done, but it also resulted in both personal and professional growth.”
