Illinois doubles down on schools as mental-health clinics

Illinois spends nearly $3 billion a year on services to support students' mental health and plans to spend even more on mental-health screenings for every student in grades 3-12, writes Carolyn D. Gorman in City Journal. She predicts disaster. "Universal mental health screenings are not only a waste of money, they're actively harmful."

They will produce huge numbers of false positives, "resulting in inappropriate diagnoses and unnecessary treatments," she writes. Children with real psychiatric issues will be less likely to get help while the system is flooded with students who were in a bad mood when they took the test.

Diagnosing mental illness in children is difficult for physicians, and it's even harder to find effective treatments. School counselors will be in way over their heads.

Advocates say school-based mental health services improve attendance and achievement, but there's no evidence that's true, Gorman writes. "Several forms of school-based mental-health services — mental-health centers, mindfulness trainings, universal cognitive-behavioral-therapy programs, and efforts to prevent depression and anxiety — have been shown not to work."

Telling children they're depressed or dysphoric is a very bad idea, writes Abigail Shrier in the Free Press. She's the author of Bad Therapy, which looked at the surge in adolescent mental-health diagnoses and psychiatric prescription drug use.

"Many young people without serious mental illness nonetheless spend years languishing with a diagnosis, alternately cursing it and embracing it, believing they have a broken brain, convincing themselves that their struggles are insurmountable because of the disorder’s constraints," Shrier writes. They take medications for depression, anxiety and ADHD that have serious side-effects and are prone to abuse.

It can start with a mental health survey, she writes.

She took her middle school–age son to urgent care for a persistent stomach ache. The nurse asked her to leave the room so he could administer a mental health screening tool created by the National Institute of Mental Health. It asks children five questions about suicidal thinking.

"Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned," writes Shrier. "Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed — how about now? Are you sure? —and he just might decide that he is."

In fact, there is no proof that mental health screeners have ever been shown to improve mental health outcomes. Nor are screeners capable of identifying who the next school shooter will likely be. They are poor at identifying which kids likely have depression, since they are not sensitive enough to distinguish it from normal periods of sadness. They do not even reliably indicate which kids are at risk of suicide.

"The vast majority of our kids and teens are not mentally ill," Shrier concludes. "But they are lonely, worried, scared, and bummed out." Schools should hold them to high expectations. They need "greater independence and responsibility. Far, far less screen time. More recess. Exercise. Art. Music. Involvement in goal-oriented activities that lure them out of their own minds and force them to think about something, anything, other than themselves."