A concerning new trend is taking hold in American hospitals and education: asking children — without parental presence — whether they are suicidal or have depression, even in the absence of any warning signs.

Journalist Abigail Shrier, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Irreversible Damage, warned in an Aug. 11 report for The Free Press that this practice — common in hospitals and now mandated in Illinois schools — may do far more harm than good.

Shrier recounted how this trend entered her own home. After her middle-school-aged son developed a stomachache at camp, she took him to urgent care. A nurse asked her to leave the room, following protocol from the National Institute of Mental Health, so he could privately question her son who had shown no signs of mental distress.

Among the questions her son was to be asked were whether he had recently wished he were dead, whether he felt his family would be better off without him, whether he had thought about or attempted suicide, and whether he was thinking of killing himself at that very moment.

“Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned,” she said. “Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed — how about now? Are you sure? — and he just might decide that he is.”

This kind of screening, she argues, is not isolated to hospitals. Illinois recently became the first state to mandate mental health screenings in its public schools annually from grades three through 12. Gov. JB Pritzker celebrated the move, saying students should be “empowered” to ask for help. 

Shrier was blunt in her response. 

“Empowered to ‘ask’ for help by submitting to mandatory and invasive mental-health surveys, that is,” she said. “If basic literacy hadn’t already collapsed in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to Pritzker’s sales pitch.”

The screenings may look compassionate on the surface, but Shrier says they can easily pathologize what are, in fact, normal phases of adolescent development. 

“A certain amount of anxiety and low mood is not only a normal part of every life, they are almost a signal feature of adolescence, reflecting dramatic periods of psychosocial and psychosexual change,” she wrote. “What might look like depression in an adult is very often just a phase in a teenager. But informing a teen that he has shown signs of ‘depression’ is no neutral act.”

For children and teens, the impact of receiving a mental health label — whether accurate or not — can be profound. 

“It can change the way a young person sees himself, create limitations for what he believes he can achieve, encourage treatment dependency on a therapist, and empty out his sense of agency — that he can, on his own, achieve his goals and improve his life,” Shrier said. “And unlike the alleged benefits of mental health screeners, there is solid evidence on the harms produced by receiving a mental diagnosis, harms that are pure tragedy in the case of misdiagnosis.”

The consequences extend beyond therapy. These same children often end up on psychiatric medication. 

“They begin courses of antidepressants that carry all kinds of side effects — suppressed libido, fatigue, the muffling of all emotion, and even an increase in depression,” Shrier wrote. “Antianxiety drugs and the stimulants given to kids diagnosed with ADHD are both addictive and ubiquitously abused. Often that tragic descent begins with a simple mental health survey.”

Despite increasing funding and focus on youth mental health, outcomes have not improved, Shrier said. 

“[A]dolescent mental health has leaped off a cliff — all while we have doubled and redoubled resources spent on adolescent mental health,” she wrote. “The nonstop diagnosis and treatment of American kids hasn’t made a dent in the prevalence of mental illness; the two have risen in parallel.”

In closing, Shrier advocated for a simpler, more human response to struggling youth. 

“The vast majority of our kids and teens are not mentally ill,” she said. “But they are lonely, worried, scared, and bummed out.” 

What they need, she said, is not more surveys or more diagnoses, but “high expectations. Greater independence and responsibility. Far, far less screen time. More recess. Exercise. Art. Music. Involvement in goal-oriented activities that lure them out of their own minds and force them to think about something, anything, other than themselves.”

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