For Annette Addo-Yobo BS’20, being named Miss Dallas 2023 was a crowning achievement after years of personal and family struggles on the way to completing her education.
When she entered The University of Texas at Dallas in 2016 as a freshman, her days were overcast with the difficulties of caring for an ailing mother and a brother with special needs. Nonetheless, Addo-Yobo persevered to earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology and child learning and development at UT Dallas and then a Master of Arts in clinical psychology at Sam Houston State University.
Along the way she wanted to compete in her first Miss America scholarship pageant, and winning Miss Dallas 2023 — only the third black woman to do so in the Miss Dallas Park Cities organization — has given her a powerful platform to advocate for at-risk young people and others, like herself, who face depression.
Born in Ghana and now a U.S. citizen who grew up in the U.S. and Canada, Addo-Yobo is a clinical research coordinator at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where she manages clinical trials in outpatient psychiatry. When she is not working, Addo-Yobo makes appearances as Miss Dallas.
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. While Addo-Yobo was at UTD, her mother developed Lewy body dementia, a rare, incurable, progressive disease that affects chemicals in the brain involved in thinking, movement, behavior and mood.
“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.”
While her father worked at his cybersecurity job, Addo-Yobo served as her mother’s caregiver 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 revolved around caring for her younger brother who has autism, a condition that most people don’t fully understand, she said.
“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 Miss Texas Scholarship pageant, which will be held June 27-July 1, 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.
Addo-Yobo’s first pageant was on the UTD campus in 2020. As a senior, she won the Tau Xi chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity’s Miss Black and Gold Scholarship Pageant. If not for the COVID-19 pandemic, she would have used her platform to champion mental health awareness, she said.
Her own battle with depression “intensified when I got to college,” she said. “Symptoms from high school were now compounded by family issues like my mom not being well and the challenges of helping my brother.”
“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.”
Annette Addo-Yobo BS’20
At UTD, she began to understand her condition and recognize many of her symptoms in descriptions of depression in classes she took in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Her depression was eventually diagnosed in graduate school, and she realized the need for advocates to destigmatize the negative perceptions of mental illness.
Addo-Yobo is now a volunteer for the North Texas chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and a state ambassador for the organization. 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 families caring for a loved one with younger-onset 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.