When I walked into my high school auditorium last December, I sensed something was wrong. The air felt heavy, the ground unstable. There was pin-drop silence, save for some stray sniffles from faculty members. One teacher’s reddened eyes stared straight ahead, not acknowledging anyone passing by her. Another struggled to make eye contact. But it was when our headmaster walked onstage and announced the suicide of a sophomore student that everyone in the auditorium was shattered.

After the assembly, people flooded the counseling offices. The school had called on community partners and sister schools to help comfort and support the 650 students. But they could only get to a fraction of the grief-stricken, many of whom are, months later, still reeling in the wake of a friend’s passing.

What became immediately apparent—despite my school’s sincere efforts at community-building and emotional support—was that schools still hadn’t figured out the right way to deal with the student mental health crisis. But can they do it alone?

Today, 11.5 percent of high school-age youth experience severe major depression. “Schools all mean well. It’s just that many are under-resourced and stigma around mental health is everywhere,” said Dr. Kirti Saxena, section chief of Child/Adolescent Psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital. “I see many middle school students struggling with depression, anxiety, and suicidality. It’s getting younger and younger, and that’s really unfortunate.”

The crisis has gained the attention of the Biden administration. “President Biden has made tackling the mental health crisis a top priority,” wrote the White House in May, “and he continues to call on Congress to pass legislation that would strengthen protections for children’s privacy, health and safety online.” In January, the US Department of Health and Human Services awarded nearly $245 million in Bipartisan Safer Communities Act funding to promote youth mental health, $185 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and about $60 million from the Health Resources and Services Administration.

But how this money is used depends on the local government. States like Colorado, California, Washington, Illinois, and Nevada were doing comparatively well in addressing youth mental health, according to a February 2022 report from the Hopeful Futures Campaign. The states that were doing the worst—ones that had not invested much in school mental health support—were Georgia, West Virginia, Missouri, New Mexico, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Around a dozen states, including Illinois and California, allow students up to five days of excused absences for mental health, often with a grace period to make up work they have missed.

But the root causes of a student’s mental health struggles are rarely confronted. “We even have a mental health week, but the very core of the problem—that students are overburdened with stress—is never tackled,” said Tanisha Agrawal, a high school senior in Pennsylvania. Agrawal noted that her school, which ranks among the top public schools in the nation, is plagued by “cutthroat competition.”

Her school eliminated midterm and final exams to avoid excess stress. But college stress, she said, remains persistent at her school. “You have to take lots of AP classes if you want to go to a really good school,” said Agrawal. “It’s true that we’re stressed, but Kinkaid is a rigorous college prep school, so the competition and drive to succeed and get into a good college is kind of in the character,” said Joycie Brass, a freshman at UT-Austin and recent Kinkaid School graduate. “We can only do so much to change it.” In a September 2022 survey of the top worries of high school seniors, 37 percent said that applying to college was the most stressful thing about senior year, while the high level of competition to get admitted to college was the biggest source of stress for another 13 percent.

Some mental health conditions can be solved more easily in schools with in-house counseling offices. “After the Uvalde shooting, millions of dollars have been pledged to different school districts and states to hire mental health professionals in schools or to stand-up programs to provide school-based services to youth,” said Caren Howard, director of Policy and Advocacy for Mental Health America. “And the new Technical Assistance Center for School-Based Services will also help schools bill Medicaid for school mental health support if they have students who qualify.”

But what about schools without these resources? Howard suggests mobile crisis response units as an effective alternative. “In Connecticut, every school district has a mobile crisis unit, with a mental health counselor, a peer specialist, or some other mental health-focused practitioner trained to give support to an individual in need,” she explained. “If a school can’t manage a crisis, they can call the mobile crisis unit to come to the school or to the student’s home, or meet them in the community, wherever they are, to figure out what next steps are best.”