Schools Make Kids Crazy

Authored by James Bovard via The Brownstone Institute,

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.”

Schools hold up as a role model Greta Thunberg, the deranged Swedish teenager whose incoherent ravings against the modern world turned her into a saint. It is irrelevant to school masterminds that many of the environmental alarms have proven to be bogus or wildly exaggerated. Children have been taught to dread, and they have been taught to implore politicians to rescue them – two very bad outcomes for mental health. Surveys by Eco-America indicate that between 57% and 70% of teens aged 13 to 17 “report anxiety symptoms linked to climate.” Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of former Vice President Kamala Harris, recently lamented on TikTok: “I think everything with the environment is really f—ing getting to me, and it is — I experience a lot of climate anxiety, like all of us do.” Turning climate anxiety into virtue signaling guarantees there will be no shortage of angst. 

Schools are also subverting mental health by vastly exaggerating other perils that students face via bizarre school shooting drills. In Indiana, elementary school teachers were shot as part of a “safe schools” training program. According to the Indiana State Teachers Association, sheriffs’ deputies ordered teachers “into a room four at a time, told them to crouch down and then shot them execution-style with pellets in rapid succession,” leaving several of them bloodied and many of them screaming. The union complained, “The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened. Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.”

Schools are “increasingly turning their hallways into an imitation of a real mass shooting, complete with police officers firing BB guns and drama students enlisted to play victims, made up with fake blood and bullet holes. Occasionally, the drills are sprung on teachers and students without warning,” as a student newspaper in Great Neck, New York, observed. A Pennsylvania teacher commented that she was “more traumatized than trained” after teachers were shot with airsoft guns by a fake active shooter. “We had colleagues shooting colleagues, we had people getting hit with [plastic] pellets.…People were screaming, trying to run. People were tripping over each other. It was just horrendous,” Elizabeth Yanelli recalled.

One of the primary beneficiaries of such antics is pharmaceutical companies that hustle anti-anxiety drugs to children. Former policeman Raeford Davis commented on lockdown/active shooter drills, “These simulated execution rituals are conducted for fear-based mass social control purposes to traumatize, instill fear, hopelessness, personal dis-empowerment, reliance on authority figures to save and protect you.” A 2021 study by Georgia Institute of Technology researchers “found that anxiety, depression and stress increase by around 40% after [school shooting] lockdown drills.” Such collateral psychic damage is especially unfortunate since the drills that schools compel students to perform are mostly useless in a real crisis. 

Plenty of students are bummed because they recognize they have practically no escape from surveillance. Schools boast of giving kids free laptops, but that becomes the equivalent of wearing an electronic ankle monitor to track everything a person writes or every step they take online. A recent study found that the vast majority of companies that schools hire to surveil students online actually track kids 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, using school-issued devices. The study found that 29% of the companies “generate student ‘risk scores’ based on online behavior.” (It is not known if such scores are skewed by visiting the Libertarian Institute website.) The Center for Democracy and Technology reported in 2023: “Student activity monitoring continues to harm many of the students it claims to help: Disciplinary actions, outing of students, and initiation of law enforcement contact are still regular outcomes” of surveillance of students’ computer use. 

A recent sea change in federal grant policy hints at how much damage Washington’s mental health interventions have already inflicted on students. In July, the US Department of Education proposed revising guidelines to prohibit federal mental health grants from “promoting or endorsing gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races.”

The fact that a new guideline would be needed for such things is indicative of the follies previously propagated by federal bureaucrats. Will another regulatory change be necessary to stop using federal grants to make kids afraid of the dark? 

Politicians, psychiatrists, and public schools are the last places to trust to safeguard mental health. Young Americans are already suffering from a downward politico-psychological spiral thanks to decades of abusive, repressive policies. Curtailing political and bureaucratic power is a vital first step to make America sane again. 

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.