The Dumpster Fire of “Mental Health” in Schools

Kids are learning to catastrophize everything and cash in on trauma points. It’s time to ditch this incentive-sapping project in victimhood.

There are children and youth in our nation’s schools who are genuinely traumatized, abused, neglected, use drugs, and worse. K12 schools can and often do successfully identify at-risk children & youth, and in partnership with other agencies and to the degree that they are able, assess these kids’ needs and get them aid.

This post is not about these kids. This post is about all the rest.

Great coaches never ask their players to consider their feelings.

The sports motto “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” means each member of the team sees exactly what he must do to achieve victory, and purposes to strive with all his skill, will, all of his all, to accomplish it.

Ruminating about pre-game jitters or personal concerns unrelated to the game are put on hold until the work at hand is done.

Likewise, most adults know that when there is pressing work to do, turning our thoughts inward and mulling on the struggle sabotages our ability to focus, toil productively, and achieve any progress — for ourselves AND for the team.

Bailing out on life, the game, the job, the goal, or the task and pulling the covers over our head literally never accomplishes anything productive.

We do our kids a grievous disservice when we fail to teach them this fundamental fact of life.

Parents know that allowing kids to spend hours every day ruminating about themselves online often leads to self-harm and other destructive behaviors. There is no question about that. We are informed about this now, and parents are taking action, getting their kids to unplug and telling them to go outside like we did back in the “olden days.”

But there is another factor with which parents must do battle. Today, parents have to contend with K12 schools, which are actively promoting the infantilizing feelings-focused, therapeutic culture which seeks to pervade every aspect of kids’ lives.

More and more, school teachers and school counselors are an influential category of professionals stepping in to take on the role of parent, life coach, psychologist, and/or therapist, even though no one asked them to.

The pervading therapeutic education model, in which “Social Emotional Learning” is a critical element, requires teachers to spend invaluable instruction time facilitating therapeutic discussions with and among the students in their care, prompt emotional focuses, and create an overall therapeutic tone for the school day.

Rather than learning to “press pause” on their emotions, or practicing temporary repression of their feelings in order to complete the important task at hand, children at school are being taught to constantly “check in” with themselves, to frequently measure and assess their inner thoughts and feelings, to express them, and even to be guided by them.

One major problem with this schooling model is, teachers lack both the training and professional ethics of licensed therapists. Often, students’ emotional concerns arise that teachers are simply unequipped to handle, in addition to making any subsequent classwork requiring focus impossible.

Students today are regularly prompted to share openly with their peers about deeply personal matters, such as parents divorcing and past abuse. Teachers label any upsetting event “trauma,” and kids are quick to adopt this catastrophizing verbiage and wield it for the social currency it has become.

Mom, journalist, and author Abigail Shrier is sounding the alarm on the harming effects of inexpert “therapists” (teachers) doing injurious “therapy” in the K12 classroom:

In sum:

• Therapeutic education inadvertently provides children looking to avoid the hard tasks they are confronted with in school with a way to do just that.

• Kids quickly achieve expert level at employing avoidance tactics such as exaggerating a current hardship, adopting a heroic lgbtq+ identity (which schools promote as “marginalized”), or outright lying about their emotional fragility. Learning is halted and self-sabotaging habits are established. Habits such as these are hard to overcome.

• Discussion necessarily always attends to students with negative experiences. This has to happen in order for the teacher to do her job, which is to facilitate social-emotional lessons.

• Blame for kids’ bad feelings will always land on parents, whether this is spoken or implied, suggesting to impressionable kids that people who work in schools are more trustworthy than their own families. This makes children vulnerable to abuse. (As we have seen with school counselors providing “gender identity” guidance to kids and keeping this intervention secret from parents, too often leading to irreparable harm.)

• Teachers are not equipped to help kids process real emotional wounds at school — because they are teachers, not trained therapists.

Above all, and most importantly, prompting children to share about their emotional traumas makes the classroom something other than a place for learning.

The classroom should be a place for learning.

For years, schools have been quietly increasing and expanding these types of therapeutic discussions in the name of mental health. Right under our noses, schools have transformed into outpatient mental health clinics, staffed largely by those with no real training in mental health.

We know that psychological interventions that are potent enough to cure are also powerful enough to hurt. Talk therapy is no benign folk remedy. It can provide relief, but it can also deliver unintended harm.

This is called the iatrogenic effect: when ruminating on your problems makes you worse rather than better.

(Parents should be cautious about their children beginning therapy and assume that they need to select carefully a professional who is aware of this potential harm.)

The iatrogenic effects of bad therapy apply just as well, if not more so, to therapeutic emphases in teaching.

By focusing on students’ mental health during the school day, educators contribute to kids’ perceived mental fragility. Teachers communicate to kids that the world they inhabit is dark and unsafe. In fact, the world is such a dangerous place that time must be carved out in the school day to check in on everyone’s trauma levels.

Take a casual inventory of the books sitting on K12 school library shelves, and you’d be tempted to conclude there is a concerted effort in our children’s schools to expose kids’ minds and hearts to dark, outright evil themes. Books like American Psycho or PUSH serve to convince youth that the world they live in is predatory, violent, twisted and perverse.

Certainly, convincing kids they are traumatized isn’t difficult with books like these.

In any case, kids are getting the clear message that, in fact, it would be abnormal if they weren’t traumatized in this dark, traumatizing world.

Interestingly, Abigail Shrier once interviewed Dr. Jordan Peterson on the topic of school surveys, which are ubiquitous now. Shrier summarizes his comments in this way: “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 her consequential book 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.

In light of this concern, a recent research study asked the question: “Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems?” The researchers conducting the study presented the hypothesis that mental health awareness efforts, like the kind used in schools today, are contributing to the reported increase in mental health problems. They called this phenomenon the “prevalence inflation hypothesis.”

Here is that study.

Here are some of the study’s findings:

“There is some existing evidence that learning about psychiatric concepts and language might indeed increase mental health problems.

The therapeutic technique of cognitive-behavioral therapy emphasizes a person's awareness of internal positive and negative self-talk patterns and behavioral habits and helps that person develop effective problem solving strategies.

A meta-analysis and randomized control trial demonstrated that teaching adolescents cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) principles in school-based interventions led to an increase in internalizing symptoms relative to control groups who do not receive the intervention.

A recent large-scale trial found that mindfulness lessons led to an increase in depressive symptoms in adolescents who had elevated levels of mental health problems at baseline.

Qualitative studies also indicate that mental health interventions can lead to increased distress in some people.

For example, adolescents who completed a school program based on CBT, designed to prevent depression, said that trying to identify negative thoughts in class made them feel low, even when they had initially felt positive.

In another study evaluating the same program, one participant said: ‘I mean, it's like you start thinking like that … that you have low [thoughts] because they bring it up all the time, negative thoughts and that you should change that all the time. But those who sort of have positive [thoughts], they start thinking negative in the end.’

This research indicates that at least some individuals experience an increase in mental health symptoms as a result of learning about these symptoms.

There is also some relevant experimental evidence that covertly telling people they are experiencing symptoms leads them to subsequently report more of those symptoms.

In one study, half of participants were informed (inaccurately) that they had elevated blood pressure and half were told their blood pressure was in the normal range. Ten minutes later, the group who received the false information reported that they experienced more symptoms commonly associated with high blood pressure (e.g., headaches, feeling flushed), relative to the group who were told their blood pressure was normal.

In another study, participants were asked to report the degree to which they experience certain symptoms, such as low mood and fatigue, and the researchers then shared covertly inflated scores with half of the participants. One week later, participants who had not noticed this artificial inflation in their scores reported higher symptoms relative to their baseline score, compared to those who did not have their symptoms artificially inflated.

These findings are relevant for understanding potential harmful consequences of awareness efforts because, almost by definition, awareness efforts educate people about potential symptoms and encourage them to notice and report them.

If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them – and this is especially true for young people who frequently receive mental health information in schools – then it makes sense that they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens.

For some individuals, the psychoeducation aspect of interventions or psychological therapy is extremely helpful, and enables them to access vital support and treatment. But if there is evidence from other contexts that learning about mental health problems sometimes causes or exacerbates distress, then it is a reasonable (and urgent) hypothesis that exactly the same phenomenon is taking place on a much wider scale as a result of mental health awareness efforts in schools.

The final element of the prevalence inflation hypothesis is that the relationship between prevalence inflation and mental health awareness efforts is bidirectional. This means that as the prevalence of mental health problems increases, [organizations that stand to profit in selling programs to schools, as well as state agencies,] understandably respond by disseminating more awareness-raising information to help individuals identify difficulties and access support.

But these efforts themselves might lead to an increase in prevalence rates via the mechanisms described above.

Furthermore, findings indicate that the relationship between the two constructs is not only cyclical but escalates: as prevalence rates increase, awareness efforts increase in response, but then prevalence rates increase further as a result and the cycle continues.”

Bottom line: Kids are thinking about their feelings too much. It’s sapping them of their grit and rendering them incapable.

A classroom that fosters student learning in essential academic skills should be laser-focused on academic curriculum content — not on feelings, or concerns kids would benefit from setting aside for a few hours while at school.

Instead of telling kids to let their feelings guide them, adults should be teaching kids how unreliable their emotions can be. A wise parent or teacher teaches children to be skeptical that their feelings reflect an accurate picture of the world, and even to ignore their feelings entirely.

You read that right: a healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression.

You know it. I know it. Kids need to focus LESS on their emotions, not MORE.

Put another way, thinking about their feelings all the time is putting kids on life’s sidelines when the best thing for them is to get in the game.

Are there studies that show school-based mental health programs to be effective at helping kids?

There are, indeed. But, unsurprisingly, most of the studies on the effectiveness of school-based mental health programs seem to be manipulated specifically for the purpose of advancing school counseling programs. Imagine that.

Learn more about that here.

This 2019 study concluded, “Considering unclear risk of bias and probable small study effects for anxiety, we conclude there is little evidence that educational setting-based interventions focused solely on the prevention of depression or anxiety are effective.”

Here are a couple more studies on this topic:

Take Care to Do No Harm: Harmful Interventions for Youth Problem Behavior

Investigating the efficacy of a Dialectical behaviour therapy-based universal intervention on adolescent social and emotional well-being outcomes

#KIDSFIRST