Aug. 12—OXFORD — David Magee, Oxford author and student well-being activist, has turned a popular talk about student mental health and substance misuse into a helpful book for parents and educators.
Magee, 57, wrote the book to offer guidance on raising teens who face increasingly common challenges like anxiety, depression, addiction, eating disorders, loneliness, social media and more.
Titled "Things Have Changed: What Every Parent (and Educator) Should Know About the Student Mental Health and Substance Misuse Crisis," the book offers insights on how to have meaningful conversations, how to empower a child to ask for help when they need it, how to decide when treatment is needed and more.
About the book
After the release of his 2021 memoir, "Dear William: A Father's Memoir of Addiction, Recovery, Love, and Loss," Magee was invited to schools, conferences and other events to speak.
During that time, he has worked to uncover the reasons behind substance misuse. Instead of focusing on broad topics like opioid abuse and the fentanyl crisis, people have to look upstream and ask "Why are these people doing this?"
It's not because they're ignorant or weak, he said. There's something else going on.
"I don't know a single person, including my son William or others who have died or been addicted, who got hooked on fentanyl, that ever went seeking it," Magee said. "They all end up there for these other issues that happen upstream in their life — things they're facing emotionally — and then end up where they didn't mean to be."
After his son, William Magee, died from an overdose in 2013, Magee began telling his story. He later shared his own addiction story in the pages of "Dear William."
Magee has publicly shared the struggles and triumphs he's faced alongside his entire family with the goal of putting a human face on addiction.
"I ended up, at one point, costing myself my marriage and my career," Magee said. "I didn't mean to. But it wasn't stupidity. It was addiction."
He's received an incredible response from those who have heard his talk — and plenty of practical questions.
"What I hear from from these parents in places when I speak, in communities like Tupelo, I'm hearing people say 'I've got children in middle school, high school and college, and honestly, I don't know,'" Magee said. "And that's because things have changed."
With no guidebook to explain and offer potential solutions for the crisis so many are experiencing, Magee set out to create one.
Telling stories for good
Magee started his work as a student well-being activist when he moved back to Oxford in summer 2016 with hopes of starting something to help students.
The William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing was established in 2019. It is externally focused and works with communities and schools while the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education serves Ole Miss students.
For a time, Magee served as director of operations. Though no longer employed by the University of Mississippi, he remains an involved alumnus as he focuses more on spreading his message nationwide while writing his second memoir, a sequel to "Dear William" titled "A Little Crazy," about mental health and the underlying issues of addiction to be released in fall 2024.
"I know it's what I'm supposed to do," Magee said. "Sometimes you just get a yearning and a calling and it's too strong to ignore and you follow. People of faith will understand that. That's just where I am. That still involves Ole Miss and will continue to involve Ole Miss, but it involves schools and families across the state of Mississippi but also increasingly schools and families across the country."
Mississippi has a long, rich history of storytelling. And as a storyteller, Magee is using his gift for good.
"If you look at communities across Mississippi, if you look at communities across the country, they're hurting in this crisis," Magee said. "It requires some person-to-person storytelling so that people in these communities realize they're not alone in this. That's the mission."
An open-ended conversation
Magee initially sought to reach students directly, and while he has succeeded in that, he realized parents need the book most of all.
"Things Have Changed" was written primarily for parents with middle school to college-aged children.
He hears from students that they want to talk to their parents but don't know how. Likewise, parents tell him they want to talk to their teens but don't know how.
It's something that Magee himself admits he didn't do a good enough job of when his children were younger. So he covered it in the book.
"The research is clear. You talk to your children and students in open-ended questions," Magee said. "I've learned that the hard way. We can't just keep telling them how they should feel and the answers they should have. We have to ask them, and pause and listen, to have a chance to know what's going on."
Open-ended questions also help children realize what exactly it is they're feeling, because oftentimes they don't even know, he said.
"You get them talking and eventually it comes out," Magee said.
"We're spending a lot of time in this generation understanding that these students need Algebra earlier, but we're not understanding that they need to learn about themselves — their brain, their emotions, their feelings and how they manage those," Magee said. "That's how you end up in substance misuse."
Magee's biggest takeaway from his work as an activist is that parents have to get involved and work on better communication with their students.
Instead of telling them what they should be, Magee hopes parents will worry more about who they are and how they are.
"We want so much for our children," he said. "We want them to excel and win a championship and make A's. And that's fine, but we've got to look at the being. How they are is so important. And the rest just kind of takes care of itself."
