Should Schools Become Mental Health Practitioners?

NO, says Abigail Shrier in her new book "Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up"

Constantly being encouraged to navel-gaze about one’s feelings, it turns out, makes a person more anxious, less resilient and less able to focus on the task at hand. Modern schools have become less and less about teaching history, reading and math. They have become more and more about medicalizing and mentalizing students.

The schools have become pass-through organizations for taxpayer money that is flowing into private companies touting their mental health benefits. Following that business model, every student needs to become a patient. Lockdowns and masking certainly played a role in breaking down young people’s defenses. If they weathered that storm, and are still not ADHD, or trans or “anxious,” the school culture will frequently make them so.

Some of those companies sell Social Emotional Learning which is marketed as “mental health,” but in reality is the on-boarding ramp to the “anxiety” train. Lessons peddle moral relativism mixed with critical theory, climate guilt and transhumanist philosophies. The confused students are then identified as anxious or depressed, so they need more mental health care in the form of more SEL. Also, anti-depressants, lots of anti-depressants.

Other private companies sell attention problems in the form of online curriculum that has them reading “excerpts” of concepts beyond their understanding, jettisoning the use of actual books. (The Problem with CKLA).

Teacher inservices have had a pronounced focus on “mental health” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” for a decade or more. Educators are encouraged to follow the “trauma informed” model, which presumes every student is traumatized in some way and encourages the teachers to dig for it. More school counselors are doing therapuetic mental health counseling. Putting aside the lack of experience and training, this is a serious ethical breach according to Ms. Shrier’s sources.

Parents who have questioned recent educational fads are constantly being told by educators that they should “trust the experts.” Who are the experts when it comes to mental health? Is it teachers who attended a two-day inservice? Is it the contracted SEL company whose stated goal is “cultural transformation?” Hardly.

A School Psychologist typically has a Master’s level education. (2 years post college.) Their training emphasizes testing for and treating learning problems.

A Clinical Social Worker most likely has a Master’s degree. Their training focus can include several areas: child protection, behavioral evaluation, or “social justice.” Some may focus on mental health counseling.

A Clinical Psychologist is a PhD doctor. (4 years post college.) This level of training is typical for a professional mental health counselor.

A Psychiatrist is an M.D. doctor. (7 years post college.) These doctors can legally prescribe medication as well as perform the duties of a Clinical Psychologist.

This author is a retired Pediatrician married to a teacher. We have both interacted with a large number of traumatized children and teens before the days of SEL and “trauma-informed” anything. Our experience was that school used to be a respite from the high drama of the household for these students. They could exhibit competence with their studies and enjoy the calmness of a structured environment at school. They could think for a few hours a day, and were not being asked to feel. They could be treated like all the other kids. It is hard to imagine how unnerving it must be for these students to have school personnel repeatedly asking them to share their feelings. News flash, they don’t feel good. If the student does have a resulting mental breakdown, what will the teacher do about it? The obsessive focus on their emotional status, rather than academic competence, must be devastating for these students.

The Free Press published an excerpt from Shrier’s book which further illuminates these issues. https://substack.com/inbox/post/142088065

We recommend reading the above link (and we will be buying the book). Here are some excerpts if you are not inclined to read the above article.

“Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity.”

Shrier attending Teacher Inservice in California.

“We talked about the need to give kids “brain breaks,” the salvific power of “Mindfulness Minutes,” and the importance of ending each day with an “optimistic closure.” Our purview was the “whole child,” meaning we needed to evaluate and track kids’ “social and emotional” abilities in addition to academic ones. Our mandate: “trauma-informed education.” We pledged to treat all kids as if they had experienced some debilitating trauma.”

“Counselors now routinely monitored the social-emotional quality of our teaching, sniffed out emotional disturbance in our students, and decided what assignments to nix or grades to adjust upward.”

Teachers are prompted to start the day with an “emotions check-in.” A truly traumatized student would strive to be tardy under this system.

“School counselor Natalie Sedano advised our assembled conference room of teachers to ask kids: “How are you feeling today? Are you daisy-bright, happy and friendly? Or am I a ladybug? Will I fly away if we get too close?”

This prompted great excitement in the audience, and teachers jumped up to share their own “emotions check-ins.”

Shrier asked two world-renowned experts in child psychiatry what they thought of the practice.

Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated, and less able to complete tasks. Their advice:

“Worry less. Ruminate less. Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.”

“If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom.”

What could possibly go wrong when teachers play at being therapists?

“Ever since her school adopted social-emotional learning in 2021, Ms. Julie routinely began the day by directing her Salt Lake City fifth graders to sit in one of the plastic chairs she’d arranged in a circle. “How is each of you feeling this morning?” she would ask, performing a more intensive version of the “emotions check-in.” One day, she cut to the chase: “What is something that is making you really sad right now?”

When it was his turn to speak, one boy began mumbling about his father’s new girlfriend. Then things fell apart. “All of a sudden, he just started bawling. And he was like, ‘I think that my dad hates me. And he yells at me all the time,’ ” said Laura, a mom of one of the other students.

Another girl announced that her parents had divorced and burst into tears. Another said she was worried about the man her mother was dating. Within minutes, half of the kids were sobbing. It was time for the math lesson, but no one wanted to do it. It was just so sad, thinking that the boy’s dad hated him. What if their dads hated them, too?

“It just kind of set the tone for the rest of the day,” Laura said. “Everyone just was feeling really sad and down for a really long time. It was hard for them to kind of come out of that.”

A second mom at the school confirmed to me that word spread throughout the school about the AA meeting–style breakdown. Except this AA meeting featured elementary school kids who then ran to tell their friends what everyone else had shared.

With children especially, whatever you focus on is what will grow,” Laura said. “And I feel like with [social-emotional learning], they’re watering the weeds, instead of watering the flowers.”

Shrier’s research concluded:

“Good therapists know that it may be counterproductive to push a kid to share his trauma at school. Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions.

Social-emotional learning enthusiasts happily disrupt math or English or history because, to the true believers, education is merely a vehicle for their social-emotional lessons. The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning. A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone.

In the minds of social-emotional learning advocates, healthy kids are those who share their pain during geometry. That is how a teacher knows they are emotionally regulated. They are willing to cry for the benefit of the class.”

Follow Abigail Shrier at her substack website “The Truth Fairy”

Author Sue Greenwald, M.D. is a retired Pediatrician with 35 years of experience treating traumatized children. She is a co-founder of Protect Nebraska Children Coalition.