Teenagers drinking, always a concern for adults, continued along a different and more troubling trend during the pandemic: Instead of drinking to fit in, teens were drinking alone to dull the pain. 

Overall teen drug and alcohol use during the pandemic—for every readily available liquor cabinet there was a canceled party—but  in teens self-reported a change in where, why, and with whom they drink. 

Rather than a social behavior, teens were, like their struggling parents, drinking alone to cope with emotional pandemic fallout.  

In Austin, educators are looking to address not only the despair and frustration driving kids to drink in isolation, but the effects of living in a home where parents or siblings are also drinking.

 â€œ(The stress of living with an alcoholic) has been a very unmet need, a gap in services,” said Tara Domasco, a social worker with Communities in Schools who co-sponsors the Crockett High School Alateen meeting. “Then you add the pandemic on top.” 

In the spring, Crockett co-sponsor Ginger Gannaway gave the high schoolers a writing prompt. 

“Just for tonight…” the prompt read. They finished the sentences with their own mantras, goals for their personal recovery. Shared anonymously in keeping with the program’s pledge, the final products paint a poignant picture of the teens’ struggles. 

“Just for tonight I won’t let other people’s opinions matter to me. I’m strong enough for what’s coming tomorrow.” 

“Just for tonight I’ll try not to get mad at my mom.  I’ll forgive her for not choosing me.”

“Just for tonight I will love myself and know that I can overcome what’s to come in the future knowing that I survived my past.”

“Just for tonight” is a modification of the popular 12-step mantra “just for today,” encouraging alcoholics, narcotics abusers, and their loved ones to confront addiction one day at a time. Alateen is designed for young people living with addicts, but many of them have begun using alcohol and drugs themselves. The children of alcoholics are four times more likely to become alcoholics themselves, according to the . 

Support for family members and prevention go hand in hand, Domasco said. As they get to middle school and high school and begin using and abusing themselves, becoming what is referred to in Alateen as a “double winner” with the wounds of life with an addict, and an addiction of their own. 

She’s hesitant to label any teenager an “alcoholic,” she said, but a good number of teens do turn to substances themselves to cope with the pain of living with an addicted or mentally unwell family member.  “If we can heal and work within the family of origin,” she said, sometimes full-fledged addiction can be avoided. 

“Just for tonight I’ll pretend that you’re not my mom and I’ll dream of the mom I want you to be.”

Gannaway was a high school English teacher in 2011, when she started attending Al-Anon meetings in Austin to support her as she coped with her teen son’s substance abuse. Meeting regularly with other family members of alcoholics and addicts helped her regulate her feelings, commit to her own health, and maintain her boundaries. 

She remembers thinking about how many teenagers needed such a group, and felt compelled to start one. “I had benefited from Al-Anon, and I knew teenagers,” she said. 

Since 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous has used community, reflection, spirituality and structure to help addicted people stay sober. In 1951, loved ones of A.A. members who had been meeting informally, formalized to form Al-Anon, which now has thousands of meetings in over 100 countries. Narcotics Anonymous followed in 1953 Alateen was born four years after that. 

Alateen is for students who live with substance abusers. Asking for a ride might reveal to their “qualifier”—the term Alateen uses for the alcoholic or addict in a participant’s life—that the teen is seeking help, and it might not be received well. Plus, when kids show up to a church basement to find adult sponsors and no other kids, she said, they’re not coming back. 

“In my head I’m thinking this needs to be in school. This needs to be where kids don’t need a ride to get here,” Gannaway said.  

It took a lot of phone calls and clearing of red tape for the Crockett meeting to finally begin in the fall of 2018 with four kids in the Communities in Schools office.

Domasco said students are finding support for more than just the addiction in their lives: Many are confronting other mental health struggles from the pandemic too. “I’ve just heard again and again students saying ‘I’m not myself anymore,” she said.  

“Just for tonight, I’ll pretend everything will be okay. I’ll be free to do whatever I want and go about my day.”

Word has started to spread between students that this specific kind of help was available. The 12 to 13-person circle is now too big for Domesco’s office, and the group meets in a classroom. As more kids show up, the adults involved can identify other needs and themes. 

Rarely does addiction exist apart from other struggles, Domasco said, and the pandemic seems to have exacerbated them all. “We know that oftentimes in family systems where there is alcohol and substance abuse we also have relational violence.”

She layers the Alateen meeting with other services specifically targeting abusive relationships, as well as nutritional support programs, as often the homes of addicts can become food insecure as limited income is spent on drugs and alcohol. 

Sometimes it works the other way around. A student is referred to her for academic struggles or behavioral issues. During intake for other issues Domesco asks about drugs and alcohol in the home, adding Alateen to her recommended services, if appropriate. 

Gannaway, who was initially shocked to see how few Alateen groups existed in Austin, sees the success of the Crockett group as proof that schools are the best place to host the groups, where professionals like Domesco and other services are all within arms reach. “It’s kind of blossomed into what we think the kids need. My dream is that every school in this city would have Alateen available to the students.” 

Rebekah Ozuna, who works for Austin ISD, overseeing programs funded through the Department of Justice grant that funds Alateen at Crockett, agrees. 

“One of the reasons I think Alateen is ready to expand and has been really successful before, during, and after the pandemic, is that it’s flexible to people’s needs,” she said.  

But she doesn’t see Alateen as the panacea for everything weighing kids down. It’s not just the coronavirus pandemic, she said, kids today are growing up amid other epidemics as well: opioids, gun violence, and cyberbullying. Feeling safe at school—which more and more kids say they do not—is going to require a multi-layer effort and “deep, deep connection,” Ozuna said.

Like so many of her peers returning to classes after two years of pandemic isolation, Crockett High School senior Klyrissa Porter often feels overwhelmed.

But the Austin, Texas, teen noticed when she would reach out to her friends to share that her mental health was suffering, the replies she received were not exactly what she’d hoped for. 

“They’d just be like, ‘LOL, same,’” Porter said.

The hallways are full of teens struggling, she said, but no one seems to be able to help anyone else move forward. “Everyone is going through a lot, and because of that we’ve forgotten how to be friends,” she said, “…to be there for each other, support each other, love each other.”

That’s particularly difficult for Porter who has been part of Students Organizing for Anti-Racism (SOAR) since her freshman year to help confront the systemic racism at school. But confronting such large troubling issues on campus requires stamina people seems to have lost during the pandemic, said students in SOAR, which meets as a regular class at Crockett. 

To honor diverse perspectives, they first have to relearn how to hear and see beyond themselves. 

“There is not a person in the world who doesn’t have something they’re going through,” Porter’s classmate, senior Lilly Swearingen said. 

Now, the same skills they use to ground their anti-racist work are helping the SOAR students rebuild the basic social skills and healthy relationships they lost during the pandemic. 

Specifically, they said, have helped them repair their relationships and see themselves in the context of community again. 

When the students in Crockett High School in Austin gather to address conflict or deepen their connection to each other, they usually gather in a circle and pass a talking piece from student to student while answering a question or responding to a prompt. 

These circles, familiar fixtures in social and emotional learning and restorative discipline, have sacred roots, said Iztac Arteaga, the restorative practices specialist at Crockett. Circles have been healing and grounding for Indigneous communities for centuries, and their power is more vital than ever in the middle of a nationwide teen mental health crisis.  

“When people feel held and seen and valued as humans, there’s just so much more that can be done as you’re navigating difficult situations,” Ateaga said. 

Difficult situations abound.

As Arteaga teaches students and teachers how to participate in and eventually facilitate circles, she is adamant that the practice not become perfunctory or sloppy. While it’s tempting  to just, for instance, grab a dry-erase marker to serve as a talking piece, she said, for a circle to be most effective, it also has to be, in some sense, sacred.

“If we knew the history and how indigneous people literally died and lost their lives to maintain these practices we’d probably treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said. 

Instead of a dry-erase marker for a talking piece, the group should choose something to convey respect, and remind them of their shared values. Same with the centerpiece, where students can rest their eyes if looking at each other becomes uncomfortable or painful. 

In her position, Arteaga facilitates and teaches “community-building” circles, which start out light, giving people the opportunity to know each other. Cross-talk and phones are not allowed. She also does trauma-informed “mediation” circles when a conflict has occurred between students or between students and teachers. 

When they returned to school, the first emotion Porter noticed was anger. Fights broke out, people lost their tempers daily. “It got to the point that we were scared to come to school,” she said, as other students nodded along with her. 

Circles at Crockett are uniquely suited for these complicated dynamics. While punitive discipline might address the behavior, restorative practices like those students learn in SOAR, speak to the pain behind the outbursts. 

“SOAR gives us a place to express ourselves, and a space where everyone can just say what they need to say,” said junior Daniella de Guzman. 

Community circles gather students to address harm done and feelings hurt, but instead of doling out punishments according to a policy handbook, each member of the circle can say what they need. Even the offending party gets the chance to express the unmet needs or pain that led to their hurtful actions. Addressing the pain keeps them in the community, and accountable to it. 

Arteaga knows the power of circles to sustain community, not just as a facilitator in schools, but as a participant.  As an Indigenous person whose ancestors were colonized out of their home and identity, ceremony is critical to her understanding of her own heritage. She participates in circles with the broader Indigenous community in Austin, and confers with the people there about how to best facilitate the practice in schools. 

It’s a careful balance, she said. Some aspects of ceremony need to be exclusive to Indigenous communities, because of the long history of cultural appropriation. 

Circles are a sacred part of the governance, community preservation, and identity of Indigenous groups, Arteaga explained, and were part of the religious and cultural practices outlawed for most of the history of the United States until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

While she recognizes the circles happening at school will be inherently less authentic to Indigenous culture—the circles in the SOAR class are named after the houses in the Harry Potter series—Arteaga wants them to be respectful of it as they gather around a centerpiece—often a fire—and designating a talking piece to pass from person to person.

“If we knew the history and how Indigenous people literally lost their lives to maintain these practices, we probably would treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said.  

While she sometimes has to educate students and teachers simultaneously, the teacher for the SOAR class had the kids well-versed and acclimated to circles, Arteaga said. With the additional grounding in history and tradition, the SOAR students have been able to facilitate on their own. Her goal is for more students and adults on campus to be able to do the same, so that circles become a regular and reliable resource. Skilled listeners and communicators can strengthen the entire support network of the school.

Freshman Will Haskell actually did learn a lot about himself during the pandemic, he said, and he knew that what he’d learned about his own mental health would help his friends, but after two years online, starting the conversation in person is challenging. “SOAR has helped me to be able to actually talk about it,” Haskell said. 

Knowing how to offer help is one skill the kids are developing, so is asking for help. Circles teach them the importance of asking for consent in both roles.

A lot of kids seemed totally dissociated— disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, Swearingen said. They shove the feelings down to make it through the day, and some then overshare with their friends online. She calls it “trauma-dumping” and says it’s almost a trend now. 

When one person posts about a mental health challenge, she said, their comments will often fill with others echoing the complaint, or even seeming to “one-up” the severity of the original poster’s distress. “If we can at least tone it down a little bit, it would help a lot.”

Even when it’s not competitive, she said, rarely do teens ask for consent before sharing their burdens via social media or direct messages. They don’t check to see if the recipient is in the right place to receive the extra weight. For two years students were isolated from each other in real life, she said, but grew accustomed to constant, around-the-clock access to one another on social media.

“It’s an expectation that has been set and it’s very uncomfortable,” Swearingen said.

Circles provide a structured way for students to listen, to see that others are going through their own struggles, without immediately hopping on board to trauma-dump. When the talking piece moves to their hands, they will have a turn. 

That predictable, structured place to safely share is critical, especially for students who want to take on society’s bigger challenges, Swearingen said. “It puts us in a spot where we can be vulnerable with each other, and because we can be vulnerable together we can be productive.”

As teenage boys in Austin, Texas, returned to school last fall after more than a year learning remotely at home, counselors were alarmed to see how many were talking about suicide. 

“We’ve definitely seen an increase in suicidal ideation,” said Roxie Frederick, a counselor at Austin Independent School District’s Alternative Learning Center who often meets the boys after their emotions have boiled over into an angry confrontation resulting in disciplinary action. 

The teens are then sent to the alternative campus after a disciplinary incident, where Frederick gets them talking about what’s really going on — and it’s not always easy to get them beyond the monosyllabic answers.

But once she does, Frederick discovers just how many of them are losing hope — like many youth across the country who are battling mental health issues after two years of isolation, fear, and struggle.

 â€œYoung males who seem tough are opening up about it,.” she said, adding it often means the teenage boys are pretty far into crisis.

The teen boys in Austin are part of a larger and terrifying trend. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association issued a joint statement declaring children’s mental health, especially children of color, a ; and a Centers for Disease Control survey found 20 percent of teens had contemplated suicide, and nearly 10 percent had attempted it. 

But that same offered a solution: Students who felt more connected to their peers had better mental health, and were less likely to report contemplating or attempting suicide. 

So even though the desperation at the heart of the mental health crisis is largely beyond Frederick and her colleagues’ control—they can’t bring back family members who died during the pandemic, loss of parents’ jobs, or social confidence— they are committed to making sure the young men can keep talking. To share their fears and frustrations before they either lash out and end up expelled, or worse, succumb to hopelessness.

A lot of the problems start in middle school, and this year’s 12-14 year-olds are in a particular bind.

The 7th grade boys from Covington Middle School missed a critical transition year, and they’ve felt it. It’s always been tempting to act tough instead of asking for help, the boys said, but the pandemic worked against them from several directions. It made them feel distant from their classmates, it deepened their anxiety and frustration, and it created a sense that the entire world was too fragile to handle whatever burdens they were carrying. 

Parents worried about jobs and health didn’t always have the bandwidth for the emotions of a kid missing their friends, or struggling with school. Friends were accessible online, but the crises in their homes often kept them from having much to offer by way of support.

“From the pandemic, you know, we forgot how to talk to people,” said Tremain Purnell, one of the kids in the Project MALES group.   

Frederick knows the reality: there’s not always a licensed counselor around when a boy is in crisis, especially for families who cannot afford a private therapist. Schools rarely have the student to counselor ratio they would need to meet the demand. Knowing that mental health resources will be hardest to access for young men of color, who disproportionately experience poverty and underfunded schools, she often connects them with Project MALES (Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success), a mentoring program primarily for Black and Latino young men.

The group setting makes it seem normal to talk about tough feelings. It gives them language to describe their struggles. And when the boys are done with their stint at the alternative center, usually just a couple of weeks, there’s likely already a Project MALES group on their home campus where they can continue getting that support. 

Serving around 200 boys on 13 Austin campuses, Project MALES is preventative as much as it is responsive. The mentors want to help as many boys as possible before something happens that would land them in alternative school, disrupting their academic progress. They do that by helping them understand the social and emotional challenges at the heart of their behavior. 

After two years of pandemic pressure kids need someone to talk to about challenging emotions more than ever. But it’s not easy to tell people how you feel, admitted Jordan Kennedy, a seventh grader at Covington Middle School in Austin. Vulnerability and seeking support can be the opposite of the tough, unaffected personas young men are trying to project.

​​“It’s honestly kind of hard, and sometimes we try to hide our feelings,” Kennedy said. Though he says he’s naturally pretty outgoing and jovial, “there is a kind of pressure, I’m not gonna lie. 2020 and 2021 has been a lot.”

It’s different when he goes to Project MALES. There Kennedy and seven other boys gather to talk through the ups and downs of their week, and practice both asking for and offering support to each other. Their mentor, a student at the University of Texas, offers support based on over a decade of research on improving academic and life outcomes for Black and Latinx young men.

“We want to provide space and opportunity for men to have these conversations they may not be able to have anywhere else,” said Emmet Campos, the director of Project MALES and the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color. Sessions often start with the boys sharing their “happies and crappies” from the week, he said, and using those experiences to work on social and emotional skills. These “power skills” have always been necessary, he said, but the pandemic made it even more so. Whatever challenges they had were exacerbated by isolation. 

But staying connected over Zoom was almost impossible, the boys at Covington said, especially as they started middle school with a bunch of kids they had not met before. 

“I would barely talk. I don’t really like to talk over computers,” Purnell said. 

 Most kids, sick of online learning, weren’t as engaged with online mentoring, Campos said. “You can’t replace the in person engagement for young men” 

A year online didn’t give them much to build on when they came back this year, either. 

“I wouldn’t be able to know people over the computer, because I might not know what they looked like,” Kennedy said. Since they’ve been back,“there has been some kind of awkwardness.” 

The Project MALES group has helped ease that awkwardness, especially for the members who were the most uncomfortable coming back, he said. “When I joined the group there were more people to talk to, more team work things, more collaboration.”

It’s also a place where talking about your feelings isn’t just allowed, but encouraged and modeled by the mentor, Purnell said. It makes it easy to follow suit. “If someone’s feeling down, you can ask them ‘what’s up, how you doing?’”

It feels natural and casual, but the Project MALES mentorship is heavily intentional. Housed in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, the mentorship is one pillar of a larger intercollegiate initiative to study the experiences of young men of color in educational settings. As they researched outcomes, particularly for Latinx males, Campos said, the founders of the initiative saw the value in mentorship, and decided to put their research into practice accordingly.

“Mentoring is a powerful intervention strategy,” Campos said, “Everybody can point to a mentor in their life that has made a difference.” 

The Project MALES staff is made up of paid doctoral students and undergraduate volunteers who receive stipends and take a two-semester class to prepare them to mentor the middle school and high school boys. The mentorship is aligned with Austin Independent School District’s social and emotional learning curriculum, and uses what Campos calls “critical mentoring” and restorative justice. The boys chosen to be in the program are often those who need a mid-level behavioral intervention, Campos explained. Instead of punishment, a has allowed Austin ISD to expand its restorative justice efforts with programs like Project MALES. 

For those students who do end up at the Alternative Learning Center after an expulsion, Austin ISD has not given up restorative and therapeutic discipline, said Frederick. 

Having groups like Project MALES on the campus at ALC allows the licensed professional counselors to focus on individual needs, she said. For some kids this will be their first and last access to professional mental health services. “There’s definitely a shortage of therapists in Austin.” 

Many would benefit from more focused therapy, but a lot can be done if those students are willing to talk to a caring adult and peers about their feelings. “If I can just show you that it’s okay to talk about your feelings,” Frederick said, she can connect them with support, often Project MALES or Communities in Schools, on their home campus.

Given the prevalence of the crisis, she added, every school would benefit from a full time presence to be there when the need arises, whether that’s school staff, mentors, or nonprofit case managers from Communities in Schools. A scheduled check in with a counselor or mentor is great, she said, but kids can’t always schedule their crises around adults’ availability. The biggest impact will be in the moment, she said. “The real work happens when they slam the door and walk out of class.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.