A Passion for Helping Others Understand Life’s Challenges

For Annette Addo-Yobo BS’20, what should have been years of fun and excitement as a college student at The University of Texas at Dallas were instead a period of uncertainty and anxiety fueled by several personal and family crises. Shouldering the difficulties of caring for an ailing mother and a brother with special needs, Addo-Yobo persevered to earn her bachelor’s degree at UTD and a master’s at Sam Houston State University.  

“It fell mostly on me to be able to balance everything that my family and I were going through,” Addo-Yobo said. “I was going through the college experience while also being a caretaker for my mom and an advocate for my brother, which was very, very stressful.”

Along the way she wanted to compete in her first Miss America Organization Scholarship pageant and was crowned Miss Dallas 2023, an honor that has given her a powerful platform to advocate for at-risk young people and others, like herself, who face depression.

Born in the West African nation of Ghana, and now a U.S. citizen who grew up in the United States and Canada, Addo-Yobo is a clinical research coordinator at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas where she manages a clinical trial study in the medical school’s outpatient psychiatry department. When she’s not working, Addo-Yobo makes appearances a Miss Dallas Park Cities Scholarship Competition titleholder.

Addo-Yobo has learned to balance a demanding but rewarding job, family challenges and her role as a pageant winner through years of resilience that required her to place others ahead of herself despite her young age. While a student at UT Dallas, Addo-Yobo’s mother developed a rare condition known as Lewy body dementia, an untreatable disease that affects nerve cells in the brain involved in thinking, memory and motor control.

“My mother was 51 when she passed,” Addo-Yobo said. “We didn’t find out what she had until she passed away and so for seven years it was just watching this chronic disease take over her life.”

With her father working in a high-pressure cybersecurity field, Addo-Yobo served as her mother’s caretaker while attending college. The pressure was inescapable.

“The amount of strain that comes with being not only a young adult but also a family member’s caretaker is difficult. It means having to sacrifice a lot of your youth,” she said.

Addo-Yobo’s life has also focused on caring for her younger brother who is on the autism spectrum and needs his sister’s help navigating a world that doesn’t understand his condition. Addo-Yobo said most people can’t comprehend autism and that no two diagnoses on the spectrum are the same.

“Growing up with my brother people would say to us, ‘He doesn’t look autistic.’ And I wanted to say, ‘Look autistic? What does autism look like?’” Addo-Yobo said. “I want people to understand how unique my brother is and that autism doesn’t have a look. Don’t judge someone with autism based on biases.”

The upcoming Miss Texas Scholarship Organization pageant will give Addo-Yobo the opportunity to address a statewide audience about the uniqueness of those with autism. Her talent portion of the pageant is spoken word and will address society’s misunderstanding of the condition.

“I really want to showcase just how unique my brother really is and to teach people that they shouldn’t try to put their own biases or assumptions about autism onto those on the spectrum, because you could very well be wrong,” she said.

Though she is competing this summer for Miss Texas and has spent the last several months in the role of Miss Dallas, Addo-Yobo’s first pageant was actually on the UT Dallas campus in 2020. As a senior, she won the Tau Xi Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity’s Miss Black and Gold Scholarship Pageant. Excited about having won the first pageant she entered, Addo-Yobo was enthusiastic about fulfilling her role as a winner through appearances on campus, but that excitement was cut short when the University was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was so disappointed and sad not to be able to do anything with my title of Miss Black and Gold,” Addo-Yobo said.

She has made up for that disappointing experience by using her title as Miss Dallas to speak about mental health awareness and her own battle with depression, which began to develop as early as high school. Addo-Yobo said she began to lose interest in many of her favorite activities at just 16 years old.

“I always knew something was up,” she said. “I just remember it was harder for me to enjoy certain things like sports, and I couldn’t bring myself to do things anymore. I didn’t want to go out and just wanted to sleep.”

Addo-Yobo grew up in a home influenced by Ghanaian culture, which she said made her early struggles more complicated because many people from Ghana don’t recognize depression as an illness. She said her parents originally didn’t believe she was depressed and just encouraged her to work harder in school and push through her feelings.

“It really intensified when I got to college,” she said. Those symptoms from high school were now compounded by family issues like my mom not being well and the challenges of helping my brother.”

It was only at UT Dallas that she began to understand her condition. At UTD, Addo-Yobo recognized many of her symptoms in descriptions of depression in classes within the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The realization of her condition continued at Sam Houston State University where she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology.

“I remember class when were learning about major depressive disorder and all the criteria and I’m like, wait a minute, I felt all these things and still feel them,” she said. “Maybe I should talk to someone.”

Her depression was diagnosed while a student at Sam Houston, which offered free counseling services for students. As a psychology major and someone diagnosed with depression, Addo-Yobo realized the need for advocates to talk about what so many people with the illness face.

“I decided I should try to destigmatize all the negative perceptions of mental illness and find ways to be an advocate instead of being passive about it,” Addo-Yobo said.

As Miss Dallas, Addo-Yobo is a volunteer for the North Texas Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and a NAMI state ambassador. She makes presentations at schools, local organizations and businesses about the signs and symptoms of mental illness. She is also a partner and mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Dallas and is involved with Lorenzo’s House, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young people who are caretakers of loved ones with dementia.

Recently, Addo-Yobo has decided to apply to law school and plans to study family law to become an advocate for young people in the juvenile justice system. She said she feels a passion to help kids who often have never had normal childhoods, just as her own childhood was interrupted by her family’s need for their eldest daughter to step up.

“I think I felt the need to carry so much responsibility because I was the oldest sibling and I wanted so badly to shield my siblings from the weight of the world,” she said.

Addo-Yobo will compete in the Miss Texas Scholarship Organization pageant in June.

---