Ironic that high-school football is being looked to as a solution, while at the same time football is being linked to CTE, depression, and mood disorders. Not to mention the frequent debilitating injuries mentioned in the article.
It's not football per se of course, it is belonging to a team, having positive activities to fill spare time, and access to a reliable adult role model (the coach).
Then form a community service group, not a sports team. Build housing for the homeless, maintain community infrastructure that has been languishing, participate in agricultural coops, those sorts of things.
Cohesion is built through the journey through a shared struggle or towards a common goal. Build some trade skills while you're at it? Bonus!
Running fast, yelling as loud as possible, and knocking into other people from time to time sounds like a great time.
I'm sure "cohesion built through the journey through a shared struggle" reads very strongly on a resume, but try telling that one girl in class that you're building trade skills on your way towards a common goal.
Our modern litigious society isn't big on letting teenagers use power tools or walk around construction sites without parental supervision (if at all). There are things high school community service groups can do, but housebuilding and infrastructure maintenance aren't among them.
In my middle school (ca 1978-80) we used power tools in shop class and one of the kids built a muzzle-loader rifle from a kit. Imagine any of that happening today!
When I was in highschool and having a rough time (nothing like these kids are going through) then I really liked hockey because for 60 mins only the game mattered, none of the other bull shit. I don't think I could get that at a robotics club, maybe you could.
Theater (stage management, sound mixing, lighting, etc) had a similar quality for me. There's something a lot more satisfying about live work, especially when the whole rest of your life is project-based.
It's in the running, but my all-time winner is still the comment that dismissed wight lifting for exercise. Called it something like "zero net work" because a rep starts and ends in the same position. I'd link to it, but that might be too mean by dang's standards.
I like threads like this one though. It reminds me not to jump straight to doubting myself when I run into a thread with more-convincing groupthink.
As someone that in highschool played both football and did robotics club, I think there was more comraderie in football, despite more of my long term friends doing robotics club. Robotics club, science fairs and programming clubs were fun, but they were just more academics. Football and other sports were a different kind of fun. They are more basic traditionally masculine fun. You do hard things like running and hitting people and you get yelled at, but it builds a shared bond that is much deeper. You also are able to let go on a sports team in a way you can't with an academic club. You don't have any girls you need to worry about, you don't have to keep clean or anything.
While legalization can be part of a solution, it is only a tiny piece.
Legalization without a broader societal change could be damaging.
We also need to change the way we look at and deal with mental health in our society. The addiction pandemic is a symptom of a sick society. We treat the symptoms, rather than the cause, at our own peril.
I wonder that the reasons given for the suicides are. The article doesn’t have a single hint as to what they may be. Of course, we can hardly be certain of the motivating factors, but it seems like a place to start in considering solution.
I would infer that it's a large number of absentee parents, either working multiple jobs, or drug-addicted, in prison, etc.
Why that leads to suicide I don't know, but teens don't generally have a great sense of the long term. If their future looks bleak now, they don't have the life experience to understand that "now" is temporary and circumstances can and often do change and work out OK in the longer term.
