Illinois First State to Promote Mental Health Drugs for Students
Summer is nearly over, and children around the country will return to school in just a few weeks. In the past, parents used to be happy when their kids headed back to school. Still, today, many Christian conservative parents are apprehensive about sending off their precious little ones to six hours of daily liberal indoctrination.
Public schools used to be places where kids learned how to read, write, and solve math problems, appreciate our country’s history, and understand the responsibility of American citizenship. This is no longer the case, as these institutions have become nothing more than radical Marxist social experiments that use children as their guinea pigs.
“Social-emotional” learning, with all of its LGBT leanings, has been a mainstay in public schools for years. But now, students in Illinois will have another bullet to dodge, as they will also be subjected to a mental health screening beginning with the 2027-2028 school year. Governor J.B. Pritzker signed SB1560 into law on July 31st, making Illinois the first state to mandate a yearly mental health screening for students in grades 3-12.
Abigail Shrier, outspoken child advocate and author of the books Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, recently remarked about this law:
“I want to be on-the-record and crystal clear. This is a disastrous policy that will do vastly more harm than good. Watch as tens of thousands of Illinois kids get shoved into the mental health funnel and convinced they are sick. Many or most of which will be false positives.”
And she’s not wrong. Having children complete a survey at school regarding their mental health is a massive overreach of the original mission of public schooling. The questions will most likely be leading and confusing, and there is no guarantee that the results will even be accurate. Parents will have the ability to “opt out.” However, if a parent is not on top of things (most aren’t), their child will have to take this survey.
In Illinois, the instrument to measure children with mental illness has not yet been developed. However, it will probably be fashioned after the Patient Health Questionnaire – 9 (PHQ-9), currently used in health care settings, and is the industry standard. The PHQ-9 asks patients to reflect over the last two weeks and answer nine questions with the following scale: Not at all (0 points), Several days (1 point), More than half the days (2 points), or Nearly every day (3 points). The questions are as follows:
- Little interest or pleasure in doing things
- Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless
- Trouble staying asleep, or sleeping too much
- Feeling tired or having little energy
- Poor appetite or overeating
- Feeling bad about yourself – or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down
- Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television
- Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or the opposite – being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual
- Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way
- A score of 5-9 indicates Mild depression
- A score of 10-14 indicates Moderate depression
- A score of 15-19 indicates Moderately severe depression
- A score f 20-27 indicates Severe depression
When interpreting the results, clinicians are recommended to offer medication for any score of 10 and above. So basically, if you have been sick, or had a couple of bad weeks, and are experiencing any normal life emotions (with perhaps the exception of taking your own life), according to this instrument, you may be clinically depressed.
This instrument was created in 1999 from an educational grant from Pfizer, Inc. Notice any conflict of interest here? Your doctor, working hand in hand with Pfizer, diagnoses you with depression, and Pfizer conveniently has a drug to make you feel better. You have now become a lifelong customer.
Can you imagine children taking a survey like this after a setback or going through the regular ups and downs of childhood and adolescence? There will be many false positives. With the new Illinois law, schools will contact parents whose child scores as having some level of depression. Parents will be concerned and take their children to quack psychiatrists who will, in turn, prescribe medication. The medication will become a crutch for the child, not allowing him/her to build any resilience or overcome obstacles that everyone experiences as they mature into adulthood. These children will be trapped in the medical industrial complex and become lifelong customers.
The unholy alliance between the drug companies and the health care establishment has been well documented. The drug companies seem to be making headway into schools, at least in Illinois. The proponents of this ghastly overreach think this is a way to prevent serious mental health issues in children. Still, we’ve all seen enough of how the drug companies manipulate data and even create diagnoses to line their own pockets.
If you are an Illinois parent of a public-school child, be sure to opt your child out of this program. Parents in other blue states also need to be vigilant if this trend starts spreading across educational institutions.