Ken Burns Broke Down Watching His New Documentary on Youth Mental Health: 'This Is Personal for Me'

A number of years ago, as Ken Burns tells it, his father-in-law — a psychologist — pointed out a meaningful undercurrent in the famed documentarian's work: "He said, 'You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong and Benjamin Franklin come alive. You wake the dead…Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?'"

The question had an obvious answer: At the age of 11, Burns lost his mother to cancer, "and there's not a day that goes by that I'm not aware in some way mentally or emotionally, or even physically of that absence," Burns, 68, tells PEOPLE in a story in this week's issue. Throughout the filmmaker's four decades examining American culture in work like The Vietnam War and the Emmy-winning series The National Parks: America's Best Idea, he's sought to make history come alive, "and I think that the success I have is due to a tragedy that caused unbelievable pain, still to this day."

In Burns's latest project, Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, the spotlight is on a modern American crisis rather than one of the past, but, he says, it may hit deeper than anything he's ever done. "This is personal for me," says Burns, who is the executive producer for the two-part documentary, streaming now on PBS.org. When Burns first saw the fine cut of the film, which was directed by his long-time collaborators brothers Christopher Loren and Erik Ewers, "I broke down. I called up Erik right away. And I said, "This is going to save lives."

At a time when more than 4 in 10 high schoolers have reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, the need for help is great. The film provides an unflinching look into the mental health struggles of 20 young people, including 14-year-old Maclayn of Billings, Mont., who, at the age of 9 after coming out as gay, experienced depression and suicidal thoughts. "I was really good at masking it. I put up my smile and nobody really knew what was going on," Maclayn tells PEOPLE. "It was just kind of 'I'm alone in this. No one else is going through a similar path that I am, and this is kind of it.'"

In making the film, "we wanted to stare mental illness in the face, literally, and say, this is what it is, this is what it looks like, this is how it feels — and let's stop pretending you can just get over it," says Erik Ewers, 53. "It's something you manage. It doesn't go away. It's a part of you, but it doesn't define you."

For Christopher Loren Ewers the project was literally life changing. "Because of the interactions we had with these incredibly courageous youth, the light bulb went off over my head," says Ewers, 44. "It wasn't until then that I recognized my own lifelong mental health struggles and I was diagnosed with general anxiety and depression. And life has been so much letter since."

Watching the kids tell their stories "You'll look into their eyes and you're going to say, 'That's me,' " says Burns.

It triggered so many things for him. "I suffered so much even before my mom died," he says. "I had anxiety, I had stomachaches and I couldn't go on school trips. Later a psychologist told me, 'It's because you didn't want to be apart from your mom. You didn't want something bad to happen when you were away.' "

"So whether it's the effects of a divorced family or alcoholism, or specific mental health things like anxiety, but before the grace of God goes everybody. And we've got to talk about it and be willing to help. These 20 kids are so brave to not only have overcome the thing that held them down, but to share their stories without shame and with such searing honesty. We have to bring sunlight into the situation."

For Maclayn, being part of the project helped him understand he wasn't alone — and that there was strength in revealing his pain: "I realized that there are people who have walked similar paths of life that I have. I really wish little me could see me now. It's just kind of amazing how many good things I have in my life now."