Illinois Governor JB Pritzker recently boasted about a new law he signed that mandates mental health screenings for children in public school starting in third grade. “[Screenings] provide early identification and intervention, so that those who are struggling get the help that they need as soon as possible,” he told reporters. “They improve academic and social outcomes. They help us break down the stigma that, too often, is a barrier to seeking help.”
Who decided it was a good idea to provide “mental health checks” to children through public schools? The career opportunists who pushed for this legislation promise it’ll be just like a vision or hearing screening, but they are dead wrong. Those types of screenings are concrete. (Can you see and can you hear?) Mental health — specifically depression, anxiety, or other mental struggles — is subjective. And in a school system rife with wannabe psychologists dying to diagnose your child, this is a recipe for disaster.
If you tell a child something factually wrong enough times, they’ll believe you. If you tell them the sky is purple, that will become their pseudo-truth. In the same vein, if you tell them they are anxious or depressed — even when they are patently not — they’ll believe you.
It’s also no coincidence that Illinois is starting these screenings in third grade. Children who are heading into their ninth year of life get their first round of pre-teen hormones. Girls in particular begin to experience anxiety and lack of confidence, particularly with their peers. For boys, the emotional outbursts are more heightened. This is the life phase during which Illinois is commencing mental health screenings. Coincidence? I think not.
Some kids need help, including medicine, to function better. Certainly, many have been greatly helped. However, the timing and wide net of Illinois’s testing is so convenient that one has to wonder if lawmakers and lobbyists specifically engineered it to catch as many children as possible and get them started unnecessarily on a life on pharmaceuticals — a life in which they may never take responsibility because they can now blame any bad mood or behavior on their diagnosis.
Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy, asked Duke University’s Dr. Allen Francis — a well-known doctor of psychiatry and author of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is often referred to as the “psychiatric bible” — about this law going into effect. “Mandatory school screenings of kids for mental illness is great in theory and terrible in practice,” Dr. Francis explained. “Most kids who screen positive will have transient problems, not a mental disorder. Mislabeling stigmatizes and subjects them to unnecessary treatments, while misdirecting very scarce resources away from kids who desperately need them.”
What does a mental health screening potentially look like? Shrier, who lives in California — a state in perpetual competition against Illinois and other Democrat strongholds in a race to the bottom — has a firsthand example. One time, a nurse asked her to leave the examination room to mentally screen her son who was sick … with a stomachache. Here are the questions that were asked:
- In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?
- In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?
- In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?
- Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When?
- Are you thinking of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.
If you ask someone, particularly an impressionable young kid who has been trained to comply with adults in authority, over and over again if he wants to kill himself, it’s increasingly likely to produce a false positive. In fact, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Stephen J. Morse, a doctor of law and psychiatry, “If you do the statistical calculation, you discover that the false positive rate [for mental health screenings] is about 97 percent.”
There is also no proof that mental health screenings do what politicians promise they’ll do. They don’t invariably prevent suicides or stop school shooters. What they do produce is a plethora of false positives that ruin the lives and agency of children while directing resources away from those who have legitimate mental health issues.
It’s another form of grooming via our public schools. If you are a parent in Illinois, there are ways to get around this mandatory screening. You can “opt out.” However, much like opting out of lessons on gender identity or sexual orientation, these wishes may be ignored. Parents can also remove their child from the public school system entirely.
Illinois’s new law is sinister and not in the best interest of children, their parents, or even the schools. Perhaps Governor Pritzker should focus on getting children to learn how to read, write, and do math instead of pushing all these politically motivated social experiments on them.
