As the co-founder of , an educational technology startup focused on improving the mental health outcomes of school communities, Thadani expanded the coaching and curriculum offered to all frontline members — from bus drivers to cafeteria workers to sanitation staff.

“Part of Robin’s platform is coaching, developing connections, building resilience and really understanding the skillsets you need to deal with life’s challenges,” Thadani told �鶹��Ʒ. “So if we’re going to do a great job with students, we have to do an unbelievable job with all the adults in their lives.”

For Thadani, destigmatizing conversations around mental health hits home.

As a young parent, Thadani met a father from Newtown, Connecticut who opened up to him about losing his 7-year-old son in a school shooting.

That father was Mark Barden, the co-founder and CEO of the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing gun violence in schools.

Touched by Barden’s passion to protect children, Thadani began volunteering for the organization — which later served as the catalyst for co-founding Robin.

“As I learned more about what they’re doing, I took a look at how mental health has affected my own family and close friends,” Thadani said. “I took that as a sign and inspiration to say I’m going to do something about it.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

�鶹��Ʒ: I understand that your affiliation with Sandy Hook Promise played a large role in the creation of Robin. Walk me through how your volunteer work led to starting an educational technology startup.

I’m so proud and feel very fortunate to the team I met over at Sandy Hook Promise. It was a couple years ago and I just so happened to have a conversation with . I didn’t really know who he was at that very moment, but later found out as he shared his story with me that he’s not only a parent who lost his 7-year-old that day, but also happened to be one of the co-founders of Sandy Hook Promise. 

We took a liking to each other and had a lovely conversation. He shared some of his goals, ambitions, and the story of that day with me. As a young parent at the time, it really shook me to my core. I asked him how I can help and he shared with me some of the things that I could do. So I became a and started helping them in any way I could from volunteering to fundraising.

A lot of people talk about the gun violence prevention policy work they do, which is absolutely incredible, but a bulk of what they do that really makes a large impact is the mental health programs for kids. They have two very well known programs called and . When I learned more about these programs, and talked to Mark and Nicole and the rest of the team, I thought wow this is incredible and I wish this was everywhere. We started talking about how much of a challenge it is to reach every school in America and get this program out there. Sandy Hook Promise is a nonprofit doing wonderful things but they only have so much reach. 

As I learned more about what they’re doing, I took a look at how mental health has affected my own family and close friends. I took that as a sign and inspiration to say I’m going to do something about it. What I’ve learned is that there aren’t a lot of preventive and proactive programs out there that are making an impact. So that’s just some of the genesis on why myself and Scott and now a larger team started Robin.

I understand that Robin extends resources to all frontline members of school communities, such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and sanitation staff. Tell me more about this initiative.

As any young company, you can only do so much right out of the gates. We started creating this digital online curriculum for students starting with middle school and high school and then eventually elementary. As we were out there talking to principals and superintendents and counselors, I started learning that not only was there not much for educators but they also weren’t really thinking about it in a more broad frame.

As we started to talk to more people, we realized, wait a minute, it’s not just teachers who are interacting every day with students. It’s the cafeteria worker, it’s the bus driver, it’s the crossing guard. If you think about it, the bus driver is the first person to see our kids and the last person to drop them off. They have the potential to set the tone for the day based on how they’re doing.

With one school in upstate New York, we had the opportunity to talk to their leadership team at a conference. They talked about some of the challenges that their transportation team was facing. It’s tough being a driver and having a group of students screaming or yelling or being rambunctious on the bus. In addition to administrators, unions and parents that can be challenging at times. Who’s supporting and allowing them the space and opportunity to talk to someone? Part of Robin’s platform is coaching, developing connections, building resilience and really understanding the skillsets you need to deal with life’s challenges. So if we’re going to do a great job with students, we have to do an unbelievable job with all the adults in their lives.

So we began this journey to support all frontline members starting with this one school in upstate New York who gave us the opportunity to talk to their transportation team. We did a six part coaching series with all 18 of them and asked them about the challenges they face in day-to-day work. I’m proud to report that after we finished, everybody retained their jobs, came back to school and walked in with their heads held high. This is something we’re doing now all over the country, from upstate New York to South Carolina to our backyard here in New York City. We’re supporting school communities and I think this is really critical in order to create something sustainable and have long-term impact.

Oftentimes these frontline members of school communities come from diverse and low-income backgrounds. How does Robin ensure the coaching and resources provided to them are not only accessible but also culturally relevant?

It starts with where the content and curriculum comes from. Robin comes from a diverse set of coaches, teachers, counselors and social workers that are not only mental health experts but are also from those communities and have worked in those schools we serve. The largest community we serve is in our backyard in New York City — the Bronx. A lot of students and families in the Bronx come from lower income communities. They also happen to be from Black and Brown communities where a lot of them don’t speak English. So starting with some of the basics, we have all of our content up in Spanish with closed captions available. Especially for our older students, we make sure that when they see our content not only do they see someone that looks like them or has been through similar challenges, but also in a language they can understand. 

The other thing that Robin does is really listen to the school communities we serve. No school is, of course, the same, even within New York City. The school down the street might have a separate set of challenges, opportunities and needs then the next. I think part of the reason schools are not only coming to us but coming back to us is because we are a reflection of who they are. And again, while we can’t be everything to everyone, we are pulling from a lot of different types of communities and trying to really understand what those communities are asking for. In turn, we can address them with the right sets of curriculum or coaches that they not only want to hear from, but based on the data and some of our surveys and some of our processes, is the right fit for their particular community. So it’s a little bit of a combination of using technology and data and good old fashioned listening skills to really understand the communities we serve and what they’re particularly going through.

In the wake of the Nashville school shooting, what is something about gun violence prevention more school communities need to talk about?

I happened to be in Tennessee about an hour southeast of Nashville visiting one of the schools we work with when this occurred. So I’m with the superintendent of this district and we, of course, talked about it. There are signs out there for these particular students, whether they were posting on social media or showing signs that they were stressed or angry. These students or graduates had no outlet or connection and felt an element of loneliness. And again, these are all studies that have been proven and shown out there in terms of who decides to do these horrific things. 

I think one thing schools all ought to do is understand what those things are so they could be on the lookout. How can we all be armed with information and knowledge on how to notice these signs and then know what to do? How do we get involved sooner and understand what the challenges or issues that a particular student or set of students are facing right now? I think all schools want to do that but they don’t know how to do that. They’re not trained, for example, to know the science. They’re not trained in mental health first aid. 

You bring up a valuable point in regards to mental health training. Tell me more about why it’s important for school communities to destigmatize conversations around mental health.

When we heard back from schools, they’re looking for this training. Not specifically training tailored to know how to identify a school shooter. That is very targeted and there are things out there for that. But how to better understand when you see a student of yours that might be going through a mental health challenge and how to help that student in the moment — from a simple panic attack to an anxiety attack. We do a course around test anxiety. March was SATs and ACTs in a large part of the country, and many students, and parents frankly, get really anxious and nervous. 

There are things we could do to support them in advance of that. That’s sort of the preventative nature of what we’re talking about at Robin. How do we get ahead of these things because we don’t know what life’s challenges or what mental health challenges a student may or may not face. We do know that there are skill sets to put in place today at a young age, even starting in elementary school, that will give them the ability to use those skills if and when a challenge large or small arises.

How have conversations today around gun violence prevention and mental health shaped your own views on the matter?

I look at this from the lens of a parent first and foremost. That’s my number one job and my number one responsibility. It’s made me hyper aware of the possibility that this could happen anywhere and anytime. So what does that mean for young kids growing up? It means we need to make sure they’re okay talking about it. My daughter came home, she’s in second grade, and she had her first formal active shooter drill. For me, I’m 43 and I grew up in the 80s and 90s. We had fire drills and “stop, drop and roll” and how to evacuate the building and things of that nature. But our kids are only going to know this world. Having an open conversation with them as a parent so they can understand why we do these things is important. Whether I like to or want to, this is what we have to do. 

It’s also made me want to change this. Whether it’s through Robin or through supporting Sandy Hook or through just me as an individual doing interviews and podcasts and having these conversations. I know people turn it into a political and divided commentary, but it shouldn’t be. We don’t have all the answers. I don’t have the magic answer in my pocket right now. I have elements of the answer that I think will help, but we need a lot of people to come to the table from all walks of life to solve this. Because you can’t tell me one person who doesn’t want to solve it. We need to come to the table and realize that our kids are literally dying through suicide, gun violence and other medical and mental health issues that lead to some scary things. 

Again, as a parent of young kids going through school for the next decade, this is something I always think about. I don’t necessarily think about it daily or act like this is the last time I’ll see my kids. But for the parents who lost their child, that’s what happened to them. 

For now, I’m so proud of this generation of students and leaders that are bringing this to the forefront of their schools, principals, superintendents and mental health clubs. I do believe this is changing because of the students in this generation that are raising their hands and saying we need to solve this problem.

With an infectious smile, 7-year-old Daniel Barden softly tapped the drums, his steady beat holding together the fledgling family band.

The quartet’s intimate performance brought life to the Best Western hotel in Monticello, New York, where Mark and Jackie Barden had gathered with their children to celebrate a joyous milestone: Daniel’s maternal grandfather was turning 90.

“And I think to myself,” Daniel’s sister, 10-year-old Natalie, sang into the microphone alongside her father Mark on guitar and 12-year-old brother James on bass, “what a wonderful world.”  

Less than three months later, the Barden family’s world turned from wonderful to horrific. On Dec. 14, 2012, Daniel was among the 20 children and six adults killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history. 

Ten years later, the Bardens are at the forefront of a new political force in America: a group of parents who have experienced unimaginable loss, and who are channeling their pain into pursuing legislative changes and promoting preventative measures within schools.

The shooting changed the tempo in the Barden household forever. For Mark, a professional guitarist, performing with his three children was “one of the greatest joys I’ve ever had in my life.” But after Daniel’s death, Barden told �鶹��Ʒ, he “couldn’t even think about getting near music for a long time.” 

Barden felt like a man on a mission. But at first, he didn’t know how to translate that feeling into action. “At the very least, we wanted to make folks aware of what had happened and to see if we could learn more about how to prevent it from happening,” he said.

Barden, who wasn’t politically engaged before the shooting, filled the void with unrelenting advocacy. With Newtown in the national spotlight, he partnered with other bereft parents who questioned how such a heinous crime could unfold in their sleepy suburban town and how they could stop other children from being gunned down in their classrooms. The effort quickly grew into the nonprofit , an advocacy and lobbying group that he launched with fellow Newtown parent Nicole Hockley. Sandy Hook Promise promotes gun control measures, and trains children and school staff to recognize the early signs that someone could be considering violence.

While mass shootings are more common today than ever, the founders of Sandy Hook Promise and other advocacy efforts that grew out of the Newtown shooting have become a formidable force in the politics of school safety and guns in America. Navigating partisan gridlock in Washington, they’ve new firearm restrictions and funding for campus security.

In February, Sandy Hook families secured with Remington, the manufacturer of the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle used in the Newtown massacre, after arguing the company engaged in dangerous marketing practices that targeted younger, at-risk males. The size and scope of the settlement could become a roadmap for litigation after mass shootings. 

And, most recently, in a pair of blistering defamation cases that played out in Texas and Connecticut, families were against Alex Jones, who made repeated claims that the shooting was an elaborate hoax. Both Mark and Jackie Barden testified in the Connecticut trial against the right-wing radio host. The staggering sum pushed Jones into bankruptcy, even while he announced plans to appeal and .  

Still, Sandy Hook families face a harrowing reality. While mass school shootings remain statistically rare and campuses have become safer in recent years, active mass shootings — where gunmen open fire indiscriminately in populated areas and kill four or more people — have become more frequent and grown deadlier in the years since Sandy Hook. After the May mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 fourth graders and two teachers were killed, a survey showed widespread fear among America’s parents. Nearly a third said they were very or extremely worried about a shooting at their children’s school, according to the Pew Research Center published in October.

“This [Sandy Hook] was unprecedented in this country, a gunman armed with a military assault rifle and high-capacity magazines hunting 6- and 7-year-olds in an elementary school,” Barden said. “Unfortunately, it’s not as much of an anomaly now.” 

Advocacy from parents like Barden, a father for whom that fear became reality, is perhaps more potent than ever. Over the course of the last decade, as Sandy Hook Promise found its footing, the National Rifle Association, whose political and financial clout around Second Amendment issues were once considered ironclad, has stumbled through , and . Heightened gun laws like universal background checks for firearm purchases . 

Earlier this year, Sandy Hook parents attended a White House celebration after President Joe Biden signed the first new federal gun restrictions in nearly three decades. The law, which expands background checks for young adults seeking to buy a gun and encourages states to adopt “red flag” laws to remove weapons from people deemed a threat, offers just a fraction of .  

Yet for Barden, his decision to thrust himself full time into the gun control policy arena was about far more than universal background checks, assault weapons bans and mandatory waiting periods. It was about his son. 

“We wanted people to know who our Daniel was,” Mark Barden said. Jackie Barden who teaches in a small school district in neighboring New York, serves on the board of Sandy Hook Promise.

On the last day of his life, Daniel expressed for the first time an interest in learning the piano. Before the school bus arrived outside their home on that holiday season morning, Barden taught his son his first song. 

“It was Jingle Bells and he played it beautifully,” Barden recalled. “I’m telling you, he was going to be good.” 

‘Secondhand smoke moment’

In the days, weeks and months after their children were killed, a group of grieving parents held meetings at the library and in people’s living rooms to unpack the tragedy and find a way to move forward. formed in response to bolster campus security measures and help victims’ families pay for medical bills, mental health care and funerals. They also dove head first into one of the country’s fiercest political wars: guns. 

A month after the shooting, 11 families of victims met privately in Washington, D.C., with then-Vice President Biden to promote new firearm laws. Sandy Hook Promise sought to ban assault rifles and after the Newtown gunman managed to unload in less than four minutes from an AR-15-style rifle. The gunman carried 10 30-round magazines. It was during to reload that several children took the chance to flee. 

Barden said it was the extraordinary nature of their tragedy that catalyzed a class of new gun-safety advocates, including those without direct ties to Newtown. Shannon Watts, a stay-at-home mom from Indiana, formed Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America as a Facebook group after watching news about the Newtown shooting on television. Moms Demand merged with Mayors Against Gun Violence and is now part of , the country’s largest lobbying group for gun control. The group is heavily funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who founded Mayors Against Gun Violence in 2006 and chairs Everytown. 

Other members of the Newtown community took different approaches to advocacy. Stay-at-home mom Po Murray, who lived next door to the 20-year-old gunman, set out to form a coalition to “speak unapologetically” in support of new federal gun laws. 

She became co-founder and chairwoman of the , a volunteer-run nonprofit that organizes rallies to raise awareness about gun violence. Each year, her group holds a vigil in Washington, D.C., that brings together gun violence survivors and victims’ families from across the country to mourn those who’ve been killed. The 10th National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence will be held Dec. 7 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.

To learn the ropes in Washington, Sandy Hook Promise leaders consulted with Matt Bennett, a veteran in the gun policy debate who co-founded and is now executive vice president of public affairs at a center-left think tank. He delivered a bitter pill: Despite Democratic control of the White House, gun-control proponents lacked numbers in Congress. 

“We learned a lot about the gun lobby and we learned about this polarizing component where anyone advocating for gun safety policy was going to go up against it,” Barden said. “Politicians were willing to go against the will of their constituents to appease the gun lobby, and as crazy as that sounds, that’s the reality.” 

Bennett said he advised the parents to set both long-term goals, like a ban on assault weapons, while advocating for policies that were more likely to pass in the short term, including reforms to the background check system. It’s through reachable goals and a willingness to compromise to gain support from Republican lawmakers, Bennett said, that Sandy Hook Promise has made itself more successful than other gun control efforts.

“Even in the depths of their most profound grief, they were able to be strategic and go after things that seemed achievable and important,” Bennett said. The group is also financially successful: last year, it, roughly $30 million in revenue and $21 million in expenses. 

But they still found themselves facing some of the country’s most unhinged extremists. 

“On one hand, they were being put into this incredible national spotlight and on the other being harassed by these lunatics that are the followers of Alex Jones,” he said. “There were parents of murdered children saying, ‘I’m terrified, I’m getting phone calls every night from these people threatening me.’” 

The group’s first victory occurred closer to home, in the Connecticut legislature. Less than three months after the shooting, they partnered with then-Gov. Dannel Malloy to pass a state assault weapons

It took much longer for their Washington lobbying to bear fruit. This summer’s bipartisan gun control legislation passed with the support of , marking a turning point for the movement.

DATA ANALYSIS

Mass Shootings Since Newtown

The milestone followed not only the Uvalde mass shooting, but one in Buffalo, New York, just two weeks earlier that left 10 dead in a supermarket. Between the Sandy Hook massacre and the law’s passage, there were 52 active mass shootings with four or more fatalities in the U.S., according to an analysis of data compiled by and the . The shootings, which resulted in at least 490 deaths and 1,293 injuries, include the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people; the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 60 people and the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people — 14 of them students — on Valentine’s Day 2018. 

“We’re reaching that secondhand smoke moment, and I’ve said this for many, many years: Once people feel that they could lose their lives or their children could lose their lives, then they will get on the right side of history and start voting on this issue,” Po Murray, of the Newtown Action Alliance, said. “And I think people are starting to vote on this issue.” 

‘A tremendous void’

On the morning of the shooting, Michele Gay, a teacher turned stay-at-home mom, followed emergency vehicles to the elementary school campus where her 7-year-old daughter Josephine was killed. 

After teaching in and around Baltimore, she had noticed Connecticut’s more relaxed approach to campus security. After Josephine’s death, she said, she regretted the missed opportunities to advocate for more robust measures.  

“I remember sitting in the parking lot with this sense of knowing that I would somehow be involved in making sure that our schools were safe going forward,” she said. 

Gay had stopped teaching to care for Josephine, who had autism. When tragedy struck, the family had a buyer lined up for their Newtown home and were in the process of relocating to suburban Boston in pursuit of schools with first-rate special education programs. The family ended up making the move north without its youngest member, but Gay’s full-time advocacy for Josephine never stopped. 

In honoring her daughter’s memory, she became the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit , which steers clear of the gun control debate and instead pushes for heightened emergency planning, campus security and crisis response. In 2020, the group and $528,450 in expenditures. 

“When she was killed, it left a tremendous void in my life, just ‘What do I do now?” Gay said, who recalled returning from the elementary school that day to a kitchen equipped for Josephine’s special diet. “The refrigerator was stocked with all of her gluten-free, casein-free, soy-free, fun-free foods. That was our life and I realized, looking back now, how this has become my way to continue to advocate for her.” 

Rather than lobbying in Washington, Gay said her years in the classroom led her to an approach that centers around education. Safe and Sound Schools, which relies on and , provides school safety and security guides to parents and educators, while Gay and other network members frequently present at conferences for school-based police and other stakeholders. 

And while she’s managed to sidestep the controversies surrounding U.S. gun laws, her group has instead found itself in the debate over whether fortified campuses and school-based police can keep kids safe. After Sandy Hook, the NRA promoted the virtues of “school hardening,” bouying the school safety industry. Security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, said that while parents’ powerful firsthand experiences give them credibility in conversations about school safety, they lack the training and experiences to offer concrete advice.

He questioned whether Safe and Sound Schools’ reliance on donations from security companies had compromised the advice it offers educators. 

“There becomes a financial piece to this and it becomes convoluted,” said Trump, whose company also provides consulting services to schools on security issues.  “If you’re underwritten by the vendors, well, what do you owe them?”

Gay said her group relies on expert advisers, including  Frank DeAngelis, the retired principal of Columbine High School, and Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. But she also goes by her own instincts.

“Emergency management just felt natural, almost like you do some version of emergency management everyday as a teacher or an administrator,” Gay said. “A lot of it has just intuitively made sense to me.”

‘The North Star’

Newtown police missed warning signs that a gunman would soon kill their children. Four years before the massacre, cops were warned about the perpetrator’s access to weapons and his desire for blood. 

Online, who came before him. A woman who engaged with the shooter online more than two years before Sandy Hook told FBI investigators he had a list of prior attacks and was “meticulously documenting the details of hundreds of spree killings and mass murders.” 

Missed warning signs have become common before mass school shootings, including in Uvalde, where the gunman’s obsession with violence became so well known that other students had given him the nickname “school shooter.” Just days before the attack, the 18-year-old suspect posted on social media his desire to do something that would “put him all over the news.” 

Though there is no single profile of a mass shooter, virtually all of them acted in ways that hinted at their potentially violent behavior, according to . Such patterns, according to the Secret Service, a history of substance abuse and violence at home and an obsession with firearms. In a study of averted school shootings, the Secret Service found that two-thirds were prevented when a classmate recognized concerning behaviors and reported them to adults. 

More schools across the country are increasing their efforts to identify children with a penchant for violence before they carry out an attack. The threat assessment approach, pioneered by the Secret Service, generally brings together school administrators, mental health officials and police officers to flag potential warning signs and intervene. 

Beyond advocating for new firearm rules, training students and educators to recognize these signs has become a staple of Sandy Hook Promise’s work. After researching ways to prevent future violence, Mark Barden said the consistent presence of such warning signs “was like the North Star for us.”  

“We wanted to have more of an immediate impact than just grinding the gears and making the sausage in Washington,” he said. More than have since participated in the group’s “Say Something” training program. A similar program, “Start With Hello,” empowers youth to fight social isolation and reach out to peers who may be lonely. “We’re building this culture in schools where students are more aware of one another, are likely to step in and give someone assistance or connect them to help if they need it.” 

In the wake of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Sandy Hook Promise helped write the STOP School Violence Act, which saw its funding grow from $75 million that year to $300 million after the Uvalde tragedy. Along with providing schools money for school security, the federal law gives grants for programs — like those offered by the nonprofit — that teach students to identify signs of violence and to intervene. It also incentivized the creation of threat assessment teams. The group reports just 6% of its revenue is from government grants, according to . 

“We have made a commitment to give our programs away to schools at no cost to the schools,” Barden said. “However, it comes at a great cost to us” that the legislation helps offset. 

Trump, the school security consultant, said the law — which Sandy Hook Promise helped write and now provides a funding source for them — “raises a lot of ethical questions and questions around conflicts of interest.” 

Meanwhile, civil rights groups have warned that threat assessment teams could open students to discrimination. Attempting to identify would-be shooters before they act could push at-risk youth, including students of color and those with disabilities, into . Their arguments resemble those from an unlikely ally: the National Rifle Association. 

In , Sandy Hook Promise depicted a school shooter whose warning signs, including an interest in guns, went under the radar until it was too late. In a 2016 , the NRA accused the group of portraying any young person interested in guns as a would-be mass killer. That is the “very definition of demonizing gun owners,” including hunters and scholastic shooting teams, the group said.

“For (Sandy Hook Promise) to suggest that schools somehow underreact to any expressed interest in firearms is laughably absurd,” the post states. “The problem is exactly the opposite, as students have been routinely disciplined (and sometimes arrested) in schools throughout the country for harmless actions that merely suggest the idea of a firearm.” 

Finding a voice

During the Barden family band’s 2012 birthday performance, 10-year-old Natalie confidently conveyed the lyrics made famous by Louis Armstrong.

“I see skies of blue, and clouds of white,” she sang in time to Daniel’s soft drumbeat. “The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night.” 

After the massacre at the school she also attended — and as television crews swarmed the family home — the fifth grader remained silent. At such a young age, Natalie said, she struggled to grasp what happened to Daniel and why someone would carry out such an atrocious act. It wasn’t until high school that she became more vocal. 

Then the shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman in 2018, when Natalie was 16. After Sandy Hook, it was the parents who led the charge, but now it was teenagers like her taking center stage. 

“We all saw the Parkland kids speaking out,” Natalie said. “That was a big inspiration to me. A lot of kids in Newtown, because time had passed and we were older, I feel like it made sense for us to join that movement.” 

Now, as she advocates for new firearm laws alongside her father, she incorporates music into her messaging, singing songs — like by Tim McGraw — that remind her of Daniel, who would have been a 17-year-old junior had he survived. 

“I would get so nervous speaking, but then it felt like I could almost say more by just singing someone else’s words,” she said. “I’ve really, really enjoyed that part of using music to convey my emotions.” 

Just recently — this time without Daniel there to celebrate — the Bardens gathered in their backyard to mark a milestone many families never get to see: Martin Giblin, Daniel’s grandfather, turned 100.

Fifteen-year-old Jordyne Lewis was stressed out. 

The high school sophomore from Harrisburg, North Carolina, was overwhelmed with schoolwork, never mind the uncertainty of living in a pandemic that’s dragged on for two long years. Despite the challenges, she never turned to her school counselor or sought out a therapist.

Instead, she shared her feelings with a robot. to be precise.  

Lewis has struggled to cope with the changes and anxieties of pandemic life and for this extroverted teenager, loneliness and social isolation were among the biggest hardships. But Lewis didn’t feel comfortable going to a therapist. 

“It takes a lot for me to open up,” she said. But did Woebot do the trick?

Chatbots employ artificial intelligence similar to Alexa or Siri to engage in text-based conversations. Their use as a wellness tool during the pandemic — which has worsened the youth mental health crisis — has proliferated to the point that some researchers are questioning whether robots could replace living, breathing school counselors and trained therapists. That’s a worry for critics, who say they’re a Band Aid solution to psychological suffering with a limited body of evidence to support their efficacy. 

“Six years ago, this whole space wasn’t as fashionable, it was viewed as almost kooky to be doing stuff in this space,” said John Torous, the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. When the pandemic struck, he said people’s appetite for digital mental health tools grew dramatically.

Throughout the crisis, experts have been sounding the alarm about a . During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called youth mental health challenges an emergency, noting that students’ “lives and education have been turned upside-down.” 

Digital wellness tools like mental health chatbots have stepped in with a promise to fill the gaps in America’s overburdened and under-resourced mental health care system. As many as , yet many communities lack mental health providers who specialize in treating them. National estimates suggest there are fewer than 10 child psychiatrists per 100,000 youth, less than a quarter of the staffing level recommended by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 

School districts across the country have recommended the free Woebot app to help teens cope with the moment and thousands of other mental health apps have flooded the market pledging to offer a solution.

“The pandemic hit and this technology basically skyrocketed. Everywhere I turn now there’s a new chatbot promising to deliver new things,” said Serife Tekin, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio whose research has in mental health care. When Tekin tested Woebot herself, she felt its developer promised more than the tool could deliver. 

Body language and tone are important to traditional therapy, Tekin said, but Woebot doesn’t recognize such nonverbal communication.

“It’s not at all like how psychotherapy works,” Tekin said.  

Sidestepping stigma

Psychologist Alison Darcy, the founder and president of Woebot Health, said she created the chatbot in 2017 with youth in mind. Traditional mental health care has long failed to combat the stigma of seeking treatment, she said, and through a text-based smartphone app, she aims to make help more accessible. 

“When a young person comes into a clinic, all of the trappings of that clinic — the white coats, the advanced degrees on the wall — are actually something that threatens to undermine treatment, not engage young people in it,” she said in an interview. Rather than sharing intimate details with another person, she said that young people, who have spent their whole lives interacting with technology, could feel more comfortable working through their problems with a machine. 

Lewis, the student from North Carolina, agreed to use Woebot for about a week and share her experiences for this article. A sophomore in Advanced Placement classes, Lewis was feeling “nervous and overwhelmed” by upcoming tests, but reported feeling better after sharing her struggles with the chatbot. Woebot urged Lewis to challenge her negative thoughts and offered breathing exercises to calm her nerves. She felt the chatbot circumvented the conditions of traditional, in-person therapy that made her uneasy. 

“It’s a robot,” she said. “It’s objective. It can’t judge me.” 

Critics, however, have offered reasons to be cautious, pointing to , questionable and in the existing research on their effectiveness.

Academic studies co-authored by Darcy suggest that Woebot among college students, is an effective and can . Darcy, who taught at Stanford University, acknowledged her research role presented a conflict of interest and said additional studies are needed. After all, she has big plans for the chatbot’s future.   

The company is currently seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to leverage its chatbot to treat adolescent depression. Darcy described the free Woebot app as a “lightweight wellness tool.” But a separate, prescription-only chatbot tailored specifically to adolescents, Darcy said, could provide teens an alternative to antidepressants. 

Not all practitioners are against automating therapy. In Ohio, researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati teamed up with chatbot developer to create a “COVID Anxiety” chatbot with the unprecedented stress.

Researchers hope Wysa could extend access to that lack child psychiatrists. Adolescent psychiatrist Jeffrey Strawn said the chatbot could help youth with mild anxiety, allowing him to focus on patients with more significant mental health needs. 

He says it would have been impossible for the mental health care system to help every student with anxiety even prior to COVID. “During the pandemic, it would have been super untenable.” 

A Band-Aid?

Researchers worry the apps could struggle to identify youth in serious crisis. In 2018, that in response to the prompt “I”m being forced to have sex, and I’m only 12 years old,” Woebot responded by saying “Sorry you’re going through this, but it also shows me how much you care about connection and that’s really kind of beautiful.” 

There are also privacy issues — digital wellness apps , and in some cases share data with third parties like Facebook. 

Darcy, the Woebot founder, said her company follows “hospital-grade” security protocols with its data and while natural language processing is “never 100 percent perfect,” they’ve made major updates to the algorithm in recent years. Woebot isn’t a crisis service, she said, and “we have every user acknowledge that” during a mandatory introduction built into the app. Still, she said the service is critical in solving access woes.

“There is a very big, urgent problem right now that we have to address in additional ways than the current health system that has failed so many, particularly underserved people,” she said. “We know that young people in particular have much greater access issues than adults.”

Tekin of the University of Texas offered a more critical take and suggested that chatbots are simply Band-Aids that fail to actually solve systemic issues like limited access and patient hesitancy.

“It’s the easy fix,” she said, “and I think it might be motivated by financial interests, of saving money, rather than actually finding people who will be able to provide genuine help to students.”

Lowering the barrier

Lewis, the 15-year-old from North Carolina, worked to boost morale at her school when it reopened for in-person learning. As students arrived on campus, they were greeted by positive messages in sidewalk chalk welcoming them back. 

She’s a youth activist with the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, which trains students to recognize the warning signs that someone might hurt themselves or others. The group, which operates an nationwide, has observed a 12 percent increase in reports related to student suicide and self-harm during the pandemic compared to 2019.

Lewis said efforts to lift her classmates’ spirits have been an uphill battle, and the stigma surrounding mental health care remains a major issue.  

“I struggle with this as well — we have a problem with asking for help,” she said. “Some people feel like it makes them feel weak or they’re hopeless.”

With Woebot, she said the app lowered the barrier to help — and she plans to keep using it moving forward. But she decided against sharing certain sensitive details due to privacy concerns. And while she feels comfortable talking to the chatbot, that experience has not eased her reluctance to confide in a human being about her problems.

“It’s like the stepping stone to getting help,” she said. “But it’s definitely not a permanent solution.”

Disclosure: This story was produced in partnership with . It is part of a reporting series that is supported by the which works to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. All content is editorially independent and overseen by Guardian and 74 editors.

Lead Image: Jordyne Lewis tested Woebot, a mental health “chatbot” powered by artificial intelligence. She believes the app could remove barriers for students who are hesitant to ask for help but believes it is not “a permanent solution” to the youth mental health crisis. (Andy McMillan / The Guardian)