Almost 25% of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring “universal mental health screening” to two million Illinois students as part of his Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue effort will ravage many students and is a warning shot to parents across the nation. Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Shrier warned that the new Illinois law will mean “tens of thousands of Illinois kids get shoved into the mental health funnel and convinced they are sick. Many or most will be false positives.”
Many young people are left worse off thanks to schools’ mental health interventions. The New York Times last year showcased psychiatric “prevalence inflation”—soaring mental illness rates among teenagers who are encouraged to view normal feelings as grave maladies. Oxford University psychologist Lucy Foulkes said school programs are “creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional.” Foulkes explained that “awareness efforts” spur young people “to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems.” Filing such complaints “leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labeling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual’s self-concept and behavior in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling,” Foulkes observed.
The perils of school mental health monitoring is multiplied by the prevailing, perverse definitions of mental illness. In 2019, the American Psychological Association officially designated traditional masculinity as a de facto mental illness, stating that “stoicism” and other traits are “on the whole, harmful.”
Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned, “Psychiatrists manufacture mental diagnoses the way the Vatican manufactures saints.” The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) now lists more than three hundred mental illnesses, five times as many as it specified in the 1960s. Dr. Allen Frances, writing in Psychology Today, warned that the latest DSM contained “many changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound” and is “likely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication.” Even caffeine withdrawal is certified as a mental illness. Psychiatrist Laurent Mottron complained that the latest version of the DSM “is full of vague and trivial definitions and ambiguous language that ensures more people fall into various, abnormal categories.”
Billable hours for shrinks have soared as the DSM vastly broadened the definition of previously recognized mental problems. After the DSM redefined autism in the 1990s, the autism rate “quickly multiplied almost 100 fold.” Thanks to another DSM redefinition, the “number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold” between 1993 and 2004, The New York Times reported.
If politicians want to help kids, they must recognize how government schools systematically undermine students’ mental health.
The COVID school lockdowns nuked the mental health of many young Americans. Depression and anxiety skyrocketed among youth and emergency rooms reported a 51% increase in suicide attempts by teenage girls in early 2021. A 2021 Centers for Disease Control survey found that 44% of high school students said they “persistently felt sad or hopeless in the past year.” Females were almost twice as likely to be depressed, with 57% “persistently felt sad and hopeless” versus 31% of male students. School shutdowns dismally failed to thwart the spread of COVID. After schools re-opened, students were hassled to comply with idiotic mask mandates that did nothing except multiply anxiety.
Schools are subverting students’ mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote “viewing each student’s” “gender identity and expression” as “valuable.” Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland. Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum “through an ‘LGBTQ+ Lens’ and ask whether books ‘reinforced or disrupted’ ‘stereotypes,’ ‘cisnormativity,’ and ‘power hierarchies,’” according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system. That brief also noted that “teachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as ‘hurtful,’ and to counter with examples of ‘men who paint their nails’ or ‘wear dresses.’” The goal is to instill in children “a new perspective not easily contravened by their parents,” as the county school board admitted.
The indoctrination produced a 582% increase in the number of kids self-identifying as “non-binary” in local schools. “Disrupting children’s thinking” has been so successful that almost half of students identified themselves as non-binary. But non-binary kids are far more likely to suffer mental illness. One survey found that more than half of transgender and non-binary youth considered committing suicide in 2022. That has not stopped other school systems from openly or covertly campaigning to sway children to repent or revolt from how they were born.
Plenty of students are bummed because they recognize they have practically no escape from surveillance. Schools boast of giving kids free laptops, but that becomes the equivalent of wearing an electronic ankle monitor to track everything a person writes or every step they take online. A recent study found that the vast majority of companies that schools hire to surveil students online actually track kids twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week using school-issued devices. The study found that 29% of the companies “generate student ‘risk scores’ based on online behavior.” (It is not known if such scores are skewed by visiting the Libertarian Institute website.) The Center for Democracy and Technology reported in 2023, “Student activity monitoring continues to harm many of the students it claims to help: Disciplinary actions, outing of students, and initiating of law enforcement contact are still regular outcomes” of surveillance of students’ computer use.
Schools have bludgeoned kids with “Chicken Little—The Sky is Falling!” environmental propaganda for decades. The result, according to the American Psychological Association, is 58% of American youth are “very or extremely worried about climate change” and 43% said “climate change impacted their mental health.” Harvard Medical Magazine reports that for many young people, “worry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other symptoms.” Schools hold up as a role model Greta Thunberg, the deranged Swedish teenager whose incoherent ravings against the modern world turned her into a saint. It is irrelevant to school masterminds that many of the environmental alarms have proven to be bogus or wildly exaggerated. Children have been taught to dread and they have been taught to implore politicians to rescue them—two very bad outcomes for mental health.
A recent sea change in federal grant policy hints at how much damage that Washington’s mental health interventions have already inflicted on students. In July, the U.S. Department of Education proposed revising guidelines to prohibit federal mental health grants from “promoting or endorsing gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races.”
The fact that a new guideline would be needed for such things is indicative of the follies previously propagated by federal bureaucrats. Will another regulatory change be necessary to stop using federal grants to make kids afraid of the dark?
Politicians, psychiatrists, and public schools are the last places to trust to safeguard mental health. Young Americans are already suffering from a downward politico-psychological spiral thanks to decades of abusive, repressive policies. Curtailing political and bureaucratic power are vital first steps to make America sane again.
