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Almost one-third of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring “universal mental health screening” to two million Illinois students as part of his Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue effort will ravage many students and is a warning shot to parents across the nation. Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Shrier warned that the new Illinois law will mean “tens of thousands of Illinois kids get shoved into the mental health funnel and convinced they are sick. Many or most will be false positives.”

If politicians want to help kids, they must recognize how government schools systematically undermine students’ mental health. 

The Covid school lockdowns nuked the mental health of millions of young Americans. A 2024 JAMA Original Investigation found that between 2018 and 2021, young people saw an almost 300% increase in the number of hospital emergency visits for eating disorders and suicidal ideation. Suicide attempts increased 250% during that time. Depression and anxiety skyrocketed among youth from the start of the pandemic, but politicians and policymakers ignored the mental carnage that Covid policies inflicted.

A 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that 44% of high school students said they “persistently felt sad or hopeless in the past year.” Females were almost twice as likely to be depressed, with 57% “persistently felt sad and hopeless” versus 31% of male students. School shutdowns dismally failed to thwart the spread of Covid. After schools reopened, students were hassled to comply with idiotic mask mandates that did nothing except multiply anxiety. 

  Schools are subverting students’ mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. These school antics reached epidemic level even before the start of the Covid pandemic. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote “viewing each student’s” “gender identity and expression” as “valuable.” Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland. Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum “through an ‘LGBTQ+ Lens’ and ask whether books ‘reinforced or disrupted’ ‘stereotypes,’ ‘cisnormativity,’ and ‘power hierarchies,’” according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system. That brief also noted that “teachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as ‘hurtful,’ and to counter with examples of ‘men who paint their nails’ or ‘wear dresses.’” The goal is to instill in children “a new perspective not easily contravened by their parents,” as the county school board admitted. 

The indoctrination produced a 582% increase in the number of kids self-identifying as “non-binary” in Montgomery County schools. “Disrupting children’s thinking” has been so successful that almost half of the students identified themselves as non-binary. But non-binary kids are far more likely to suffer mental illness. One survey found that more than half of transgender and non-binary youth considered committing suicide in 2022. That has not stopped other school systems from openly or covertly campaigning to sway children to repent or revolt from how they were born. 

Schools have bludgeoned kids with “Chicken Little – The Sky is Falling!” environmental propaganda for decades. The result, according to the American Psychological Association, is that 58% of American youth are “very or extremely worried about climate change” and 43% said “climate change impacted their mental health.” Harvard Medical Magazine reports that for many young people, “worry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other symptoms.”

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