NEWPORT — Former New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice John Broderick Jr. has spent the past several years speaking with students throughout northern New England to help bring awareness to the warning signs of mental illness in an effort to prevent crises such as the one his family experienced.

Now, with the backing of Lebanon-based Dartmouth Health, for which he works as senior director of external affairs, Broderick has published a book, Backroads and Highways: My Journey to Discovery on Mental Health. Through the book, he hopes to reach the parents and grandparents of the students he’s been speaking with in recent years.

“What surprised me is how common what I’m seeing is across all of New England,” Broderick, a 75-year-old North Andover, Mass., resident, said in a December phone interview. “I didn’t realize the depth and scope of anxiety and depression among young people.”

Through the book, Broderick, who served as chief justice for six years and later as dean of the University of New Hampshire School of Law, shares what he’s learned over six years, 100,000 miles and about 350 speaking engagements with middle and high schools. In it, he describes how his sharing the story of his son’s depression and anxiety, his own injury at his son’s hands in 2002, his son’s subsequent incarceration and the family’s recovery helps make the students he meets comfortable sharing their own struggles with him.

“I love these kids,” he said in the interview. “The kids have a lot of problems. The kids are not the problem. There’s no bad guy.”

But he said he thinks there are ways that adults have over-structured children’s lives and made them overly competitive, which has the effect of making young people afraid to fail, made it difficult for them to make decisions and lowered their resilience.

“They are not given the opportunity to learn from mistakes,” he said.

He urged adults to “stop the film and take a look at what’s happening. They need to talk to their kids, listen to them, maybe take their foot off the gas pedal a little bit.”

As a child, Broderick, who does not have training in mental health care but speaks from his own personal experience and those of others who have shared their stories with him, said he benefited from the inefficient use of time.

“It was called childhood,” he said. “Kids are over-organized. I see it everywhere.”

In the book, Broderick chronicles visits to both public and private schools. He describes speaking at a prep school where one of the students who introduced him had recently lost a parent to suicide. His talk also has been well-received by adults, including graduate students at Dartmouth College and by workers in a New Hampshire Department of Transportation garage, he said.

“This problem is hiding in plain sight,” he said.

Though much has been made about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on youth mental health, Broderick said he’s “leery” about making too much of that connection. These days things are “back to baseline,” but “baseline was not great,” he said.

In Broderick’s view, the solution is both easy and hard. The culture needs to change.

Some of the changes he seeks may seem small, such as altering the language used to describe mental illness. He noted that when someone has cancer they are not described as cancer, but people are sometimes described as mentally ill.

Other changes are larger: “(We) need to build a mental health system in this country,” he said.

He said he hopes that parents and grandparents might use his book as a way to spark a conversation among them about mental health in hopes that they might recognize signs and symptoms of illness in the children in their lives before a crisis arises.

“When you’re vulnerable in front of kids, which I am every time I speak, they will return the favor,” he said. “I’m impatient for change.”

Broderick is scheduled to hold a book talk at the The Old Courthouse restaurant in Newport on Jan. 10 from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. Reservations can be made by calling 603-863-8360.

Books can be purchased at the Old Courthouse event and online on Amazon. Net proceeds from book sales will go to a fund that Broderick has established to support psychiatric services at DH.

Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.

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