Liberals love to talk about book banning. Abigail Shrier had her 2020 book, "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters," temporarily pulled from Target's website after what I believe was one complaint online. You could see why the trans rights activists were up in arms: Shrier attributed the spike in school girls believing they were transgender to social contagion. It was a craze. Fortunately, it passed for most girls before they were fast-talked into puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatments.
Shrier has a new piece in The Free Press about universal mental health screenings of kids, and she says it's dangerous.
Shrier writes:
Illinois intends to crop-dust its public schools with mental-health diagnoses.
Last week, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed into law mandatory annual mental-health screenings for all public school children in third through twelfth grades. “Illinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools,” the governor trumpeted on X. “Our schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help—they’re empowered to do it.”
He did:
Illinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools.
— Governor JB Pritzker (@GovPritzker) August 2, 2025
Our schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help — they’re empowered to do it. https://t.co/hQnDs0JQ2j
Shrier continues:
Recommended
Empowered to “ask” for help by submitting to mandatory and invasive mental-health surveys, that is. If basic literacy hadn’t already collapsed in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to Pritzker’s sales pitch.
In fact, far too many American children and adolescents without debilitating mental disorders have already been funneled into the slippery mental-health pipeline.
Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned. Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed—how about now? Are you sure?—and he just might decide that he is.
Introduce “gender dysphoria” into a peer group, and a swath of seventh grade girls are likely to decide they were born in the wrong body. Introduce “testing anxiety” or “social phobia,” or “suicidality” to them, and many teens are likely to decide: I have that, too. There is a reason clinicians keep anorexia patients from socializing unsupervised in a hospital ward; anorexia is profoundly socially contagious.
We're entrusting these surveys to whom? Guidance counselors? School nurses? Someone else on staff … someone brought on specifically to "diagnose" disorders like anxiety, depression, or trauma. As Shrier points out, "trauma" is not a recognized mental illness.
X had a lot to say to Pritzker about mandatory mental-health surveys:
For teachers, right?
— Heather Champion (@winningatmylife) August 8, 2025
You are destroying their mental health.
— Alex Napier Holland 🦍 (@NapierHolland) August 5, 2025
You have trained a generation of young people to obsess over any negative feelings — this is proven to destroy mental health.
Please read 'The Coddling of the American Mind' by Jonathan Haidt — he explains this all.
This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. I was put on mental health drugs against my will at 14. I didn’t know any better and they ruined my life. I just got worse and worse until I finally got off of them 20 years later. You will regret this.
— Terrible Quality Memes (@BadQualityMemes) August 7, 2025
“Illinois is now the first state in the nation to take mental health decisions away from parents in public schools.”
— 🇺🇸 (@BosunPipe) August 2, 2025
Because, they’re our kids, not yours you idiot parents…
OH HELL NO.
— The Based Mother (née Elena) (@TheBasedMother) August 3, 2025
Schools should not EVALUATE children’s mental health. Opt OUT! Parents stay on top of this or your children will be walled off from you before you even know it happened.
— Martha Byrne (@MarthaByrne10) August 7, 2025
This is like state-sponsored Munchausen.
— Andrea E (@AAC0519) August 12, 2025
Shrier correctly says these surveys will lead to a number of false positives. A child who's going through a sad phase may be diagnosed with clinical depression. And I can only imagine where the school counselors go from there … "Do you think maybe you're sad because you were born into the wrong body"?
I have a huge interest in mental health, and also a huge mistrust of public schools. Why do they think they're the ones to diagnose a child's mental health? My guess is they're hoping to catch kids who are suicidal, which Schrier recalls. She took her middle-school-aged son to a doctor because of a stomachache, and was asked to leave the room while the nurse employed a mental health screening tool put out by our National Institute of Mental Health. She photocopied it; the questions were:
1. In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?
2. In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?
3. In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?
4. Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When?
5. Are you thinking of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.
He's there for a stomachache, not an interrogation suggesting he might be suicidal.
There are so many areas that public schools should stay out of. Schools are already "transing" kids behind their parents' backs. Maybe teach the kids to read and do math.
***
