Universal Mental Health Screenings in Schools Are Dangerous

On July 31, 2025, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed SB 1560, a disastrous bill that will require all public school students in grades 3-12 to undergo universal mental health screenings in 2027. This may look promising at first glance. Who would be against helping children struggling mentally—especially since the 2020 COVID lockdowns, when youth mental health struggles grew rapidly? However, this bill has potential flaws that must be considered.

First, there is no plan.

As I prepared to write this article, I was curious about how these assessments would be executed. In my research, I was suddenly beset with questions.

Who will do the screenings?

How will these people be trained (if at all)?

Who will interpret the screenings?

What screening tools will they use?

How will parents be contacted (if at all)?

How can families opt out? What is the liability?

Facing The Worst Tragedy Imaginable

In 2016, I was a supervisor for a team of school counselors in Palo Alto, California, in the middle of a suicide cluster. While I was there, six students died by suicide in one school year.

This matters because, as the school counseling supervisor, my team was at the whim of the administration, who made it worse. These were administrators who had good intentions but lacked experience and insight into what actions may or may not be effective. The community was reeling, and everyone was looking for someone to blame, and the pressure placed on students of this Silicon Valley school was the perfect scapegoat. When tragedy struck, the school ordered me and my team to meet with hundreds of students to assess their “risk.” Arbitrary lists were put together, and we were required to meet with students identified to bluntly ask if they were suicidal.

Most of the students were unhappy that they were forced to leave their class and answer intrusive questions.

Some figured out how to avoid classwork by falsely claiming they were suicidal. Fear among the adults and youth increased. None of it was prevention.

These screenings were conducted without parental consent and against the wishes of several students, allegedly in the name of “safety.” California bill SB 543 enables youth 12 and up to see a therapist without parental consent. Early in the school year, we met with hundreds of unreceptive students, while the ones we knew needed support were neglected due to poor prioritization and limited resources. Following this, there were five more suicides in that single school year.

Ironically, despite all of the “prevention,” every single student who died was not on anyone’s radar.

This Isn’t Helping

The school felt like they were helping, but feelings are not a measure of success. Most parents were looking to the government school for solutions. They wanted more screenings, more counseling, and additional systems in place to support their children. What the parents should have been doing is looking within their own families, rather than relying on a dysfunctional bureaucracy to solve their personal problems.

When Pritzker signed the bill for universal mental health screenings, he said,

“It is our responsibility to ensure that young people have all the support they need to get the help that they deserve.”

This raises two questions:

1. Is it the government’s responsibility to provide children with “all the support they need”?

2. Will the plan actually provide “support” at all?

Perhaps the over-reliance on government is a contributor to why mental health issues have spiked. The government isolated these kids and created a worldwide panic.

Are we now supposed to believe that these same people care about our children’s mental health and well-being?

No More School Counselors

As someone with ten years of experience leading a school counseling team, I no longer believe that on-site school mental health counseling is the solution. School counselors in 2025 are under-qualified and indoctrinated with radical left-wing ideology. They are known for convincing kids that they were born in the wrong body and even introducing hormone treatment behind parents’ backs.

Even with the best intentions, a school counselor cannot do meaningful work by design because parents are not there.

In fact, no mental health assessments can be fully accurate without a parent’s point of view on the child.

It seems that these screenings will just give the government cover to increase funding for unskilled, radical counselors, who are hell-bent on turning children against their parents and getting them hooked on unnecessary drugs.

It is unclear what screening tools will be used. However, the most common depression screening used in medical offices today, the PHQ-9, was conceptualized by Howard Kroplick, a marketing man at Pfizer when they released the antidepressant, Zoloft. It is no accident that the widespread use of such a tool has led to more antidepressant-dependent patients.

I wonder if any drug companies are behind this bill…

Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage and Bad Therapy, has been vocal about the shortcomings of SB 1560. She posted on X:

“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.”

I couldn’t agree more.

In her book Bad Therapy, she also discusses how therapy itself can do serious damage. I agree—children don’t need to be familiar with so many labels and too often, normal feelings of sadness and worry get diagnosed as clinical depression and anxiety. Plus, most kids do not benefit from focusing on negative emotions. And let’s not pretend that there aren’t kids who wouldn’t say they are suicidal to get out of a test or school assignment, or otherwise exercise power over the teachers, then land in the mental health pipeline to never come out. In many ways, we are enabling kids to be professional patients.

Providing mass mental health assessments in schools is a recipe for false positives. We can not overlook the many serious long-term consequences of casually labeling children with mental health disorders. Manhattan Institute policy analyst Carolyn D. Gorman named a few:

“Giving children an inaccurate diagnosis can harm their well-being. Even a ‘correct’ diagnosis has potential downsides; it does not explain the cause of a mental health problem, can lock a child into a label, and does not guarantee access to the right treatments. For some young people, medical diagnoses, including mental health diagnoses, can shape their identity and expectations, lead to long-term medication use, affect job prospects, and diminish their sense of control over their future.”

I can not overstate how much damage widespread school-based mental health screenings will do in Illinois and beyond. Thankfully, on August 15, 2025, Representative Mary Miller introduced a new bill to combat the overreach of SB 1560, called the “Parents Opt-in Protection Act.”

This bill will require “prior written consent from a parent or the student (if an adult or emancipated minor) before any school survey on sensitive personal information can be administered.”

If this passes, it will be one step toward protecting parental rights. However, parents first need to recognize that mass mental health screenings for children lead to serious harm.

For more detailed information on how to empower yourself as a parent and navigate the mental health field, see the Parents' Guide to Mental Health. Pamela is the author of A Practical Response to Gender Distress, a tool book for parents who do not want to affirm a false gender identity and Froggy Girl, a cute rhyming children’s book about self-acceptance.

Therapists: earn three professional CEUs while learning the truth about the gender industry here.