Kids are more likely to get mental-health care at school than anywhere else, and parents are out of the loop.
American schools have quietly transformed into pseudo-psychiatric clinics.
Schools are now the most common provider of youth mental-health services in the U.S. More kids get mental-health care at school than in any other clinical setting. The ubiquity might have parents assuming school services are high-quality, well-regulated and effective. They’d be wrong on all counts.
What passes for mental-health care in schools is mostly superficial, like screening kids if they worry but don’t know why—or, more ominously, if they’ve considered how they’d kill themselves. What’s not formal screening is typically pseudo-screening—mental-health awareness campaigns, educating all students and teachers how to screen themselves and each other for signs of distress.
A healthy student needs only to check a survey box to be funneled by teachers and school staff toward a clinician for a diagnosis and a pill. Parents are meant to be engaged, but minor age consent laws are often lower for mental health—12 in some states, and younger in others if a counselor thinks a student is mature.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute. This piece is based on a recent issue brief.
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