Participating schools

 Anytown-style retreats have been held in several states across the country, including: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia

 Bay Area schools known to have sent students to Anytown-style leadership retreats include:

East Side Union High School District: Andrew P. Hill High School, Evergreen Valley High School, Independence High School, James Lick High School, William C. Overfelt High School, Piedmont Hills High School, Santa Teresa High School, Silver Creek High School, Yerba Buena High School

San Jose Unified School District: Broadway High School, Gunderson High School, Pioneer High School, San Jose High School

Campbell Union High School District: Del Mar High School, Leigh High School, Westmont High School

Palo Alto Unified School District: Henry M. Gunn High School, Palo Alto High School

Piedmont Unified School District: Millennium High School, Piedmont High School

Morgan Hill Unified School District: Live Oak High School, Ann Sobrato High School

Fremont Union High School District: Cupertino High School, Fremont High School

Mountain View Los Altos High School District: Mountain View High School, Los Altos High School

Milpitas Unified School District: Milpitas High School

San Mateo Union High School District: Burlingame High School

Charter schools: East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy, ACE Charter High School

Private school: Castilleja School

— Karen de Sá

Among those selected for the fall Everytown camp was Carmel Evans, a soft-spoken 18-year-old who attended a program for students with emotional disturbance at Andrew P. Hill High School in San Jose. Suffering from depression, she’d had difficulty getting out of bed in the weeks before it began.

Her mother, Genese Evans, didn’t know much about the camp before her daughter left. “I didn’t even know where it was to be honest,” she said, and faults herself for not being better informed. “I figured it was for school so it couldn’t be all bad.”

After camp, her mother said, “It was really good when she first came back. She was happy and excited, she was telling me about her friends that were there.” But she got the impression that some “trying and challenging” things there had pushed Carmel “beyond her limit.”

In interviews during camp and afterward, Carmel said she had relished the intense experience and closeness her group had shared. Shortly after camp, she posted on Instagram that the experience was “amazing” and she hoped to remain as brave as she’d been there. But she’d also felt upended. Being one of few African American and biracial kids in the stereotyping exercise “felt really nerve-racking and unsettling,” she said. The list of slurs “made me feel like — I guess not necessarily hopeless, but kind of like, what’s the point, you know? If people believe this about me, what is to stop me from believing it about myself ?”

When other campers would gather as a large group to lighten the mood after the intensive exercises, Carmel would sneak back to her cabin alone. She had a history of making superficial cuts on her arms with various sharp objects, a desperate attempt to find emotional relief. The need grew worse at camp, she said, and she cut herself as many as nine times over its four days. She told a teacher at the camp about harming herself and checked in with her social worker back at school.

“I was disappointed in myself,” she said. “Why am I leaving the experience? I left, and I came back and I felt sad. I think it was because they were all happy and singing and having their community — and I went off to slice my skin.”

On the third day at Camp Everytown, students stood facing each other for the Family Line. A facilitator somberly prompted them to step forward if they identified with the statement being read. Have you ever been in foster care? Have you been affected by alcoholism or drug addiction?

Have you had a family member in jail or prison?

Almost every teen stepped forward to another prompt: “Please take a step forward if you have ever considered suicide.”

Questioning students about suicidal thoughts is a long-standing practice at Camp Everytown. Staff members say it shows students they are not alone and offers them peer support. They maintain they are aware of no negative aftereffects of such exercises.

But mental health practitioners called the technique dangerously misguided, particularly with little or no clinical expertise on hand.

Child psychiatrist Thomas Tarshis, who directs mental health clinics for Bay Area teens, said his clinicians use a similar type of prompting exercise in intensive outpatient programs. But the questions, aimed at bringing teens and their parents together, focus on things like hobbies and movies.

“You would never ask a question like, ‘Have you ever thought about killing yourself ?’” he said. “It’s not healthy to ask loaded mental health questions in large group settings, or any questions about rape or domestic violence. We would not ask such loaded questions even in a room filled with mental health professionals.”

Yet for years, Bay Area schools have sent students to Anytown camps whose exercises are known to be triggering, even in the most delicate of times. Palo Alto and Henry M. Gunn high schools, for example, continued sending students to Camp Everytown through a multiyear stretch beginning in 2009, when nine former, current or incoming students died by suicide, a disturbing cluster that attracted national attention.

In cases of self-harm and suicide, minimizing risk of contagion is key, according to suicide-prevention groups and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Tool kits for schools confronting mental health crises call for suicide issues to be handled by professionals trained to identify risk factors and safely handle follow-up care.

“Asking young people — especially in a group like that — to publicly acknowledge that they’ve had suicidal ideation or maybe even attempts, I don’t know what that does to the other kids in the room,” said Jack Glaser, social psychologist and

UC Berkeley public policy professor.

Glaser, who has served on Berkeley’s Committee for Protection of Human Subjects, which reviews research proposals, said such panels are reluctant to approve studies that involve any questions about suicide unless there’s a clinician available 24 hours a day to respond when the answer is yes.

Of the Everytown campers, he said: “If they see that 30 to 40 percent are stepping forward, they could be asking: ‘Why haven’t I thought about suicide?’ ”

There are signs that some camp directors are rethinking their programming. At a 2017 conference in Santa Barbara organized by the National Federation of Just Communities, members shared concerns about outdated curriculum, school counselors sending students to camp to be “fixed” and the need for more mental health professionals.

Camps for students in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties ended Hunger Banquets, a concept originally developed by the charity Oxfam International. The exercise would randomly sort kids into into groups by “class,” serving the upper class a nicely prepared chicken meal, while the lower class got bread, rice and water. Among those assigned to the lower class were teens who had known hunger in their own lives.

In Coming Out Star, an exercise once used at camps run by Anytown St. Louis, students are given stars of varying colors and told they are gay. One group is told their community has reacted to them with hatred; no one speaks to them; they’ve become depressed and dependent on alcohol and drugs. Instructed to tear up their stars, according to scripts of the exercise, they are told: “You’re now a part of the 40 percent of suicide victims who are LGBT.”

Director David Martineau said the exercise was halted as “way too triggering” and “overly traumatic.”

Jarrod Schwartz, who oversees the Just Communities camp held for students from California’s Central Coast since 2003, said his program aims to broadly explore social injustice, rather than mine teens’ individual pain. His volunteer camp staffers also receive 60 hours of training, far more than those at most camps.

“If things are being done responsibly, they shouldn’t be done to trigger emotions or to artificially create them,” Schwartz said. “You don’t teach about abuse by abusing people, and you don’t need to hurt people to learn about things in our world that are harmful.”

Schwartz said his agency has decided not to hold its residential camp this summer because of “an unprecedented level of fear and anxiety” among LGBT groups, immigrants and students of color — a