{"id":62656,"date":"2025-08-12T00:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T00:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/62656\/"},"modified":"2025-08-12T00:06:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T00:06:07","slug":"stop-asking-kids-if-theyre-depressed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/62656\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Asking Kids If They\u2019re Depressed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Illinois intends to crop-dust its public schools with mental-health diagnoses.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed into law mandatory annual mental health screening for all public school children in third through twelfth grades. \u201cIllinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools,\u201d the governor trumpeted on X. \u201cOur schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help\u2014they\u2019re empowered to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Empowered to \u201cask\u201d for help by submitting to mandatory and invasive mental health surveys, that is. If basic literacy hadn\u2019t already <a href=\"https:\/\/www.illinoispolicy.org\/literacy-epidemic-hits-illinois-as-fewer-than-1-in-3-students-read-well\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">collapsed<\/a> in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to Pritzker\u2019s sales pitch.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, <a href=\"https:\/\/mchb.hrsa.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/mchb\/data-research\/nsch-data-brief-adolescent-mental-behavioral-health-2023.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">far too many<\/a> American children and adolescents without debilitating mental disorders have already been funneled into the slippery mental-health pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>I know: I\u2019ve spoken to hundreds of parents of such kids.<\/p>\n<p>In 2024, I published <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/93116\/9780593542927\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Bad Therapy<\/a>, an investigation into the surge in adolescent mental-health diagnoses and psychiatric prescription drug use. Many young people without serious mental illness nonetheless spend years languishing with a diagnosis, alternately cursing it and embracing it, believing they have a broken brain, convincing themselves that their struggles are insurmountable because of the disorder\u2019s constraints. They meet regularly with a therapist or school counselor on whom they become increasingly reliant, losing a sense of efficacy, unable to navigate on their own even minor setbacks and interpersonal conflicts. They begin courses of antidepressants that carry all kinds of side effects\u2014suppressed libido, fatigue, the muffling of all emotion, and even an increase in depression. Antianxiety drugs and the stimulants given to kids diagnosed with ADHD are both addictive and ubiquitously abused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illinois intends to crop-dust its public schools with mental-health diagnoses. Last week, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed into&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-62656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}