In this case, doing nothing is better than doing something.
School districts across the nation mistakenly assume that taking action on youth mental health is always positive. It isn’t.
The Cure Causes the Disease
Matilda Gosling recently posted a thread on X about the unintended consequences of mental health interventions and why some school and workplace schemes may in fact contribute to the problem they were designed to solve, writing, “Doing nothing is sometimes better than doing something.”
Gosling’s research-based conclusions about the increased focus on mental health echo those of Abigail Shrier, who authored Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.
In Bad Therapy, Shrier argues that the mental health of Gen Z — people born between 1997 and 2012 — is a mess because of the INFANTILIZING THERAPEUTIC CULTURE which pervades every aspect of their lives, writing, “The rising generation has received more therapy than any prior generation. Nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional—compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers. Forty-two percent of the rising generation currently has a mental health diagnosis, rendering ‘normal’ increasingly abnormal. One in six US children aged two to eight years old has a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. More than 10 percent of American kids have an ADHD diagnosis—double the expected prevalence rate based on population surveys in other countries. Nearly 10 percent of kids now have a diagnosed anxiety disorder.”
The fact is, kids today receive more therapeutic care than any previous generation EVER, leading to substantial expansion of the therapeutic industry, and yet they are sicker than ever:
Some stats: Gen Z runs a higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem than previous age groups, 23.6% of 12th graders use illicit drugs, and just 45% of Gen Zers report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent,” compared with 51% of Gen Xers and 70% of Baby Boomers.
There’s more:
A concerning 42% of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and an astounding 60% take medication to manage their mental health. Not to mention, the rate of self-harm for girls age 10-14 increased over 300% from 2001 to 2019, and, according to a 2021 CDC survey, 1 in 3 teenage girls have seriously considered killing themselves.
To recap: This seems to be a very troubled generation of kids. This is also the most diagnosed, therapatized and medicalized generation. Could the “cure” be keeping the patient sick? Could the course of treatment be making the patient sick?
Big Government to the Rescue
Outrage and alarm over The Youth Mental Health Crisis has, of course, not gone unnoticed by our expansionist government and the self-interested leaders driving it.
In 2024, the Biden Administration made HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF FEDERAL DOLLARS available to the nation’s school districts to fund the mass installment of an army of novice counselors into our K12 schools — counselors who will provide ineffective mental health treatment to a generation of kids who would benefit from LESS therapy, not MORE.
And, of course, the K12 Education Industrial Complex is working hand in hand with the Biden administration to expand school-based behavioral healthcare in America’s schools on an UNPRECEDENTED SCALE, creating A DIRECT PIPELINE into schools for progressive proselytes ready to put to use their shiny new, freshly-printed counselor and social worker certificates.
School districts’ governing boards right now are feverishly submitting federal grant application proposals in order to apply for many, many more unlicensed behavioral health workers to come into schools and influence children, without parental knowledge or consent.
School districts use the broad term “mental health professionals” in these grant application proposals — quite a title inflation for people with wet-ink Masters Degrees but no license from a professional board, no regulatory oversight, and no fear of malpractice lawsuits, but who are certified by state departments of education to work in schools with ZERO scope of practice limitations.
Social Emotional Learning
But it’s not just school counselors. The focus on kids’ mental health is happening in the classroom, too. The new therapeutic education model charges schools to emphasize “social-emotional learning” during the school day, which requires teachers to role-play as therapists.
In Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier cautions that teachers run the risk of raising emotional concerns in classroom discussions that they are unequipped to handle. She cites students reflecting on parents divorcing, sharing about abuse, and other deeply personal moments arising in the classroom in response to the teacher’s prompting.
Teachers are not trained to handle these scenarios, and asking children to share about their emotional traumas makes the classroom something other than a place for learning. “One wonders how educators get away with a pretext so transparent,” writes Shrier, “but succeed, they do. For more than a decade, they have been quietly increasing and expanding their interventions, transforming every school into an outpatient mental health clinic, staffed largely by those with no real training in mental health.”
The arguments Shrier makes about iatrogenic effects of bad therapy apply just as well to therapeutic emphases in teaching. Teachers should focus on academic curriculum content and not turn their classrooms into therapy centers.
The Problem With Surveys
Shrier also considers the rise in suicidality in recent years and suggests that one element in play may be the therapeutic surveys administered in school, surveys that seek to determine if students have considered suicide, what methods they may have contemplated, and if they would do so again.
There is no doubt there exist children and youth in our schools who are abused, neglected, who use drugs, and are raped. No one denies that. Every decent human being wants to help those kids. These surveys do not help those kids. These surveys simply present to all children the ontology of a darkly degraded world and convince them that they inhabit it.
Such surveys, Shrier argues, introduce dark elements to students’ minds and suggest that, if students are not contemplating such subjects, they are somehow abnormal.
(Side note: In recent years, books that do exactly this have greatly increased in number, AND K12 school libraries can’t shelve them fast enough. It’s almost as if there is a concerted effort to put monstrous and monstrously perverse images into kids’ minds. But I digress.)
Shrier interviewed Dr. Jordan Peterson on the topic of distressing surveys given to kids in school and his comments about such surveys are instructive. Shrier summarizes: “Because suicide and self-harm are so contagious among teens, Peterson said, adults must be extremely careful not to ask kids leading questions.” She quotes Peterson directly: “Like [the question], ‘When was the last time you thought about cutting your wrists?’ Do you know how much information there is in that statement? First of all, the information is—Well, people do this. The next piece of information is: You could be doing this. … It’s so likely that you’re doing this that I can just ask it as a casual question.” The ultimate implication is, disastrously: “Well, what the hell’s wrong with you if you’re not doing this?”
In Bad Therapy, Shrier provides examples from various state-level surveys highlighting the frequency with which students are asked to consider their own mental health, arguing that raising these questions again and again and again reinforces the idea that students should have mental health problems.
Truth Falls on Deaf Ears
School districts across the nation are operating under the assumption that taking action on youth mental health is always positive. It isn’t. In fact, research shows that increased focus on students’ mental health in school actually makes kids’ mental health WORSE. You can find links to several of these research studies at the bottom of this post.
But the research into the efficacy of “social emotional learning” and mental health practices in schools doesn’t seem to be filtering through to those who are enthusiastically commissioning the large-scale transformation of K12 schools from places of learning into therapy centers.
Why are they turning a deaf ear?
School district officials have latched on to the youth mental health crisis to virtue signal rather than act on behalf of kids’ best interests. This is understandable, as perpetuating the erroneous assumption that more time in the school day devoted to discussing how kids are feeling boosts students’ sense of well-being helps those pushing the therapeutic education model, “community schools,” and school-based health centers to appear virtuous. Why would any elected member of an education board risk their carefully constructed public reputation by deigning to look at actual facts?
Public focus on The Youth Mental Health Crisis is a distraction from the fact that schools are failing to educate our kids. (About 40% of kids are categorized as nonreaders, and at age 15 a mere 14% show proficiency in reading, while nearly 20% fail to meet ANY basic standards.)
K12 education loyalists and gleeful government expansionists are seizing the opportunity to broaden government schools’ role in children’s lives and push parents even further out to the edges of the circle of influence. Anti-parent sentiment runs rampant in both the K12 education complex and in the Daddy Government camp.
And so, America stands by and watches as the “therapeutic education model” takes over our children’s schools, and good people obediently zip our lips when they tell us surely, anyone who “truly cares about kids” wouldn’t dare oppose the changes.
“We lost this somewhere along the way: the sense that these kids we raise, they’re ours. Our responsibility and our privilege. We are not the subordinates of the school psychologist or the pediatrician or our kids’ teachers. We are more important than all of them combined—as far as our kids are concerned. We gave our kids life, we sustained it, and we are the ones who bear the direct emotional consequences of how those lives turn out. It’s time we acted like it.”
— Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Take Care to Do No Harm: Harmful Interventions for Youth Problem Behavior
Be sure to subscribe to A Legal Process on Substack.
#KIDSFIRST
There is no medical money in people who are not patients, just as there is no "special ed" money in students who are academically succeeding. If you fill the schools with activist "therapist" hammers, most of whom probably became therapists because they themselves actually need therapy, all students become nails. The irony of competition-free, tax-funded service providers (such as the government schools) is that they have reverse, perverse incentives, and so become playgrounds for charlatans, especially Democrats pretending to be helpful folks, folks who measure their own success by how much of your money they're shoveling into their systems. In the private sector, persistent failure is discouraged via defunding due to lack of customers. In the government schools, persistent failure is rewarded, with captive taxpayers being chastised for not spending enough and consequently (and stupidly) voting to have their tax rates increased. Taxpayers themselves have reverse incentives; subsidized parents are brainwashed to believe that more money equals better education, so they vote to increase the tax burden on their childless neighbors and on corporations, thereby increasing their net subsidy despite their own personal higher tax payments. Of course when their subsidy disappears (i.e. when their kids leave school) they flee to lower-tax areas, leaving their former jurisdictions to collapse under the tax burden they voted for.
The root of the psych-therapy insanity, like all other government-school insanities, is our socialist school system. Socialist systems, with their captive funding sources, are immune from the natural selection of customer feedback, so they are inherently filled with incentives to fail and consequently require ever more money in search of ever more failed initiatives. I wish that we "conservatives" would wake up and realize that THE ROOT IF ALL GOVERNMENT SCHOOL FAILURE IS ITS FUNDING MODEL, and consequently that THE "PUBLIC SCHOOLS" CANNOT BE FIXED, NO MATTER HOW HARD WE TRY, because socialism cannot be fixed, no matter how hard we try. We might as well try to make water run uphill. We can never do enough work to earn all the money needed to fix a system where the entire administration is incentivized to fail, and ironically the more money we shovel in, the more we incentivize an ever-larger school staff to fail even more.
Great article! We’ll done. Thank you for spreading the word on what I’ve dubbed the “therapeutic education model” - let’s hope it sticks!