Mental Resilience and the Pressure to Belong | Roundtable
I did not expect a conversation about musical theater to make me rethink how I talk to my own kids.
That is what happened when I sat down with Dana Zell, Kikau Alvaro, and Jess Decker for the first roundtable discussion on this podcast. Kikau and Dana lead CMT San Jose, now in its 58th season, producing eleven full-scale Broadway-style productions a year with young performers ranging from eight years old through young adulthood. Jess is a licensed therapist who works with children, teens, and families. I brought them together to talk about Dear Evan Hansen, CMT's current production, and what I did not anticipate was how quickly the conversation moved from a single musical to something much larger: what it actually means to help a young person build an identity resilient enough to survive the world they are growing up in.
As an orthopedic surgeon, I spend a lot of time thinking about physical resilience. What this conversation reminded me is that the mental version is not separate from it. It is foundational to everything else.
You Will Be Found
Dear Evan Hansen premiered on Broadway in 2015 and 2016 and landed with a force that the theater community still feels a decade later. The show follows Evan, a teenager with severe anxiety who finds himself tangled in a lie that begins as an act of desperate belonging and metastasizes, through social media, into something he never imagined and cannot control. The themes are specific and unflinching: isolation, family fracture, socioeconomic disparity, the gap between who we perform ourselves to be online and who we actually are, and the particular cruelty of being a teenager who simply wants to matter to someone.
CMT was given the opportunity to be the first non-professional theater company in this region to produce the show, and Dana described that as something the organization had been quietly waiting for. The story reflects the community they serve. The young people in their productions, the families in their seats, the kids who come in barely knowing how to stand on a stage and leave eight weeks later with something they will carry for the rest of their lives. That alignment felt important enough to pursue carefully, which is why CMT brought in a mental health consultant named Chris Miller before rehearsals even began, to help the cast navigate heavy material and give them language for what they might encounter in the rehearsal room and in themselves.
The show's central anthem, You Will Be Found, is the moment when Evan's message escapes its original context and goes viral. What the production asks, and what our conversation kept returning to, is a question about what it means to be seen, and what happens when the version of yourself that gets seen is not entirely true.
Lying as Survival
Jess made a point about Evan early in our conversation that I have not stopped thinking about. The lies he tells are not malicious. They are in service of mattering. At fourteen or fifteen or seventeen, belonging is not a preference. It is survival. Your nervous system does not distinguish between social rejection and physical threat, and so the teenager who bends the truth to secure a place in a group is, in a very real biological sense, doing what it takes to stay okay.
That reframe changes how a parent might respond when they catch their kid in a lie. The instinct is often criticism: why would you lie about that, this is so silly, this is such a small thing. Jess's recommendation was to approach with curiosity instead. What did you think was going to happen? What was your plan here? Not as a gotcha, but as a genuine attempt to understand what the child was trying to protect. The lie is a symptom. The need underneath it is the thing worth getting curious about.
This applies directly to social media, which runs through Dear Evan Hansen the way it runs through the actual lives of the young people in the audience. Jess described the current landscape clearly: teenagers today spend roughly fifty percent less time in person with their peers than previous generations did, and that time has migrated to phones. The friction that used to happen face to face, the arguments and teasing and misunderstandings that taught kids how to navigate conflict and repair relationships, now happens on screens. For a teenager already genetically predisposed to anxiety, the phone that starts as a lifeline can quietly become a wall. The isolation compounds. The ability to re-engage in person becomes harder. And the version of other people's lives visible on social media, curated and filtered and absent all context, starts to feel like a standard to measure against.
What we see online, Jess said plainly, is not real. Our job as parents is to help kids actually unpack that, not just say it and move on.
The Secret Sauce
What CMT does that I found genuinely surprising is cast everyone. Not everyone who auditions for the lead, but every child who wants to participate gets a part. Dana walked me through how this actually works in practice, and it is more sophisticated than it sounds.
The production staff does significant work before rehearsals begin to structure ensemble groups in ways that allow every skill level to contribute meaningfully. A group of less experienced performers will rehearse their material together, build it to the best of what they can do, and then rejoin the full cast. The moment those two groups merge, something happens. The less experienced kids rise to meet the larger production, and the result is something none of them could have created alone. Nobody is decorative. Nobody is hidden. Everyone has a valued place in a living, breathing piece of work that they helped make.
Dana described this as the thing that makes CMT special, and I think she is right, but I also think it is the thing that makes theater special as a category. It is not structured the way competitive sports are, where skill sorting happens early and visibly and kids who arrive late to a sport can feel the gap immediately. Theater, at least at CMT, is structured around what everyone can contribute, not what separates them.
Jess extended this into a larger argument about identity and resilience that I want to sit with for a moment. The most resilient kids, she said, are the ones who have diversified. Not just in activities, but in the sources of their own sense of self. If everything you are is invested in one thing, losing that one thing is catastrophic. The goal as a parent or coach is not to tell a child when their time is up. It is to build an environment in which they have so many contributing factors to their identity that they can withstand whatever succeeds and whatever does not, and learn to trust themselves in the process.
I see this in my clinic constantly. Kids who come in with an overuse injury and have nothing else going on in their lives wear it on their faces and their parents' faces differently than kids who have other things to turn to. It is not about caring less. It is about not having all of yourself concentrated in one place.
Conversations Worth Having
One of the most practical things that came out of this roundtable was about using theater, or film, or any shared artistic experience, as a doorway into conversations that are hard to start from scratch.
One in five teenagers is currently diagnosed with anxiety. That is diagnosed, Jess pointed out, which means the actual number is higher. Getting real information out of a teenager about what they are worrying about or struggling with is notoriously difficult. You ask how their day was. Fine. You ask what happened at school. Nothing. The direct approach closes more doors than it opens.
Sitting next to your kid and watching something together, and then asking what they thought, works differently. Dear Evan Hansen gives parents prompts that are built into the story. Why do you think Evan did that? Would you have made a different choice? Has something like that ever happened at your school? The question is not about your child. It is about a character. The distance makes it safer, and safer often means more honest.
On the question of what age this show is appropriate for, the answer from both Jess and the CMT leadership was that it depends entirely on the child and what they already know. For the heavier themes, including suicide, which the show does address, the recommendation was somewhere around sixth or seventh grade as a starting point, with the caveat that finding out what a child already understands before adding more information is always the right first move. The show's music has been in the culture for nearly a decade. Many kids already know the songs. The conversation may already be more available than parents realize.
Connect
You can find Jess Decker at licensedtolisten.com. Dear Evan Hansen runs April 10 through 18 at the Montgomery Theater in downtown San Jose. For tickets, audition information, classes, and summer camps, visit cmtsj.org. For more conversations like this one, subscribe to The Resilience Factor wherever you get your podcasts, and find me @dr.pamelamehta on social media.
