{"id":21859,"date":"2025-08-25T22:45:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T02:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21859"},"modified":"2025-08-25T22:45:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T02:45:17","slug":"politicians-multiply-mental-illnesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/25\/politicians-multiply-mental-illnesses\/","title":{"rendered":"Politicians Multiply Mental Illnesses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Politicians Multiply Mental Illnesses<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, August 25, 2025<\/p>\n

Almost 25% of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring \u201cuniversal mental health screening\u201d to two million Illinois students as part of his Children\u2019s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue effort will ravage many students and is a warning shot to parents across the nation. Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Shrier warned that the new Illinois law will mean \u201ctens of thousands of Illinois kids get shoved into the mental health funnel and convinced they are sick. Many or most will be false positives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many young people are left worse off thanks to schools\u2019 mental health interventions.<\/strong> The<\/em> New York<\/i> Times<\/i> last year showcased psychiatric \u201cprevalence inflation<\/span><\/a>\u201d\u2014soaring mental illness rates among teenagers who are encouraged to view normal feelings as grave maladies. Oxford University psychologist Lucy Foulkes said school programs are \u201ccreating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they\u2019re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional.\u201d Foulkes explained that \u201cawareness efforts\u201d spur young people \u201cto interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems.\u201d Filing such complaints \u201cleads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms<\/span><\/a>, because labeling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual\u2019s self-concept and behavior in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling,\u201d Foulkes observed.<\/p>\n

The perils of school mental health monitoring is multiplied by the prevailing, perverse definitions of mental illness.<\/strong> In 2019, the American Psychological Association officially designated traditional masculinity<\/span><\/a> as a de facto mental illness, stating that \u201cstoicism\u201d and other traits are \u201con the whole, harmful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned, \u201cPsychiatrists manufacture mental diagnoses the way the Vatican manufactures saints.\u201d The American Psychiatric Association\u2019s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) now lists more than three hundred mental illnesses, five times as many as it specified in the 1960s. Dr. Allen Frances, writing in Psychology Today<\/i>, warned that the latest DSM contained \u201cmany changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound\u201d and is \u201clikely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication.\u201d Even caffeine withdrawal<\/span><\/a> is certified as a mental illness. Psychiatrist Laurent Mottron complained that the latest version of the DSM \u201cis full of vague and trivial definitions and ambiguous language that ensures more people fall into various, abnormal categories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billable hours for shrinks have soared as the DSM vastly broadened the definition of previously recognized mental problems. After the DSM redefined autism in the 1990s, the autism rate \u201cquickly multiplied almost 100 fold.\u201d Thanks to another DSM redefinition, the \u201cnumber of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold\u201d between 1993 and 2004, The<\/em> New York Times<\/i>\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n

If politicians want to help kids, they must recognize how government schools systematically undermine students\u2019 mental health.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The COVID school lockdowns nuked the mental health of many young Americans. Depression and anxiety skyrocketed among youth and emergency rooms reported a 51% increase<\/span><\/a> in suicide attempts by teenage girls in early 2021. A 2021 Centers for Disease Control survey found that 44% of high school students said they \u201cpersistently felt sad or hopeless in the past year.\u201d Females were almost twice as likely to be depressed, with 57% \u201cpersistently felt sad and hopeless\u201d versus 31% of male students. School shutdowns dismally failed to thwart the spread of COVID. After schools re-opened, students were hassled to comply with idiotic mask mandates that did nothing except multiply anxiety.<\/p>\n

Schools are subverting students\u2019 mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote \u201cviewing each student\u2019s\u201d \u201cgender identity and expression\u201d as \u201cvaluable.\u201d Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland. Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum \u201cthrough an \u2018LGBTQ+ Lens\u2019 and ask whether books \u2018reinforced or disrupted\u2019 \u2018stereotypes,\u2019 \u2018cisnormativity,\u2019 and \u2018power hierarchies,\u2019\u201d according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system. That brief also noted that \u201cteachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as \u2018hurtful,\u2019 and to counter with examples of \u2018men who paint their nails\u2019 or \u2018wear dresses.\u2019\u201d The goal is to instill in children \u201ca new perspective not easily contravened by their parents,\u201d as the county school board admitted.<\/p>\n

The indoctrination produced a 582% increase<\/span><\/a> in the number of kids self-identifying as \u201cnon-binary\u201d in local schools. \u201cDisrupting children\u2019s thinking\u201d has been so successful that almost half of students identified themselves as non-binary. But non-binary kids are far more likely to suffer mental illness. One survey found that more than half of transgender and non-binary youth considered committing<\/span><\/a> suicide in 2022. That has not stopped other school systems from openly or covertly campaigning to sway children to repent or revolt from how they were born.<\/p>\n

Plenty of students are bummed because they recognize they have practically no escape from surveillance<\/strong>. Schools boast of giving kids free laptops, but that becomes the equivalent of wearing an electronic ankle monitor to track everything a person writes or every step they take online. A recent study found that the vast majority of companies that schools hire to surveil students online actually track kids twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week using school-issued devices. The study found that 29% of the companies \u201cgenerate student \u2018risk scores\u2019<\/span><\/a> based on online behavior.\u201d (It is not known if such scores are skewed by visiting the Libertarian Institute website.) The Center for Democracy and Technology reported in 2023, \u201cStudent activity monitoring continues to harm many of the students it claims to help: <\/b>Disciplinary actions, outing of students, and initiating of law enforcement contact are<\/span><\/a> still regular outcomes\u201d of surveillance of students\u2019 computer use.<\/p>\n

Schools have bludgeoned kids with \u201cChicken Little\u2014The Sky is Falling!\u201d environmental propaganda for decades.<\/strong> The result, according to the American Psychological Association, is 58% of American youth are \u201cvery or extremely worried about climate change\u201d and 43% said \u201cclimate change impacted their mental health.\u201d Harvard Medical Magazine reports that for many young people, \u201cworry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia,<\/span><\/a> obsessive thinking, and other symptoms.\u201d Schools hold up as a role model Greta Thunberg, the deranged Swedish teenager whose incoherent ravings against the modern world turned her into a saint. It is irrelevant to school masterminds that many of the environmental alarms have proven to be bogus or wildly exaggerated. Children have been taught to dread and they have been taught to implore politicians to rescue them\u2014two very bad outcomes for mental health.<\/p>\n

A recent sea change in federal grant policy hints at how much damage that Washington\u2019s mental health interventions have already inflicted on students. In July, the U.S. Department of Education proposed revising guidelines to prohibit federal mental health grants from \u201cpromoting or endorsing gender<\/span><\/a> ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that a new guideline would be needed for such things is indicative of the follies previously propagated by federal bureaucrats. Will another regulatory change be necessary to stop using federal grants to make kids afraid of the dark?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Politicians, psychiatrists, and public schools are the last places to trust to safeguard mental health. Young Americans are already suffering from a downward politico-psychological spiral thanks to decades of abusive, repressive policies. Curtailing political and bureaucratic power are vital first steps to make America sane again.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politicians Multiply Mental Illnesses by James Bovard, August 25, 2025 Almost 25% of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring \u201cuniversal mental health screening\u201d to two million Illinois students as part of his Children\u2019s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2349,4619,4621,148,30,3700],"class_list":["post-21859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-covid","tag-mental-health","tag-pritzker","tag-schools","tag-surveillance","tag-transgender"],"yoast_head":"\nPoliticians Multiply Mental Illnesses - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Politicians and schools are multiplying the mental illnesses they promise to cure\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/25\/politicians-multiply-mental-illnesses\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Politicians Multiply Mental Illnesses - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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