Children are wildly suggestible. Ask repeatedly if she might be mentally ill—and she just might decide that she is.
Illinois intends to crop-dust its public schools with mental-health diagnoses.
Last week, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed into law mandatory annual mental-health screenings for all public school children in third through twelfth grades. “Illinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools,” the governor trumpeted on X. “Our schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help—they’re empowered to do it.”
Empowered to “ask” for help by submitting to mandatory and invasive mental-health surveys, that is. If basic literacy hadn’t already collapsed in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to Pritzker’s sales pitch.
In fact, far too many American children and adolescents without debilitating mental disorders have already been funneled into the slippery mental-health pipeline.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press (paywall)
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Abigail Shrier is the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.
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