This is a profound government overreach.

I llinois Governor JB Pritzker is bragging about a new law he just signed making his state the first to mandate annual mental health screening for every student starting in third grade. Unlicensed people will now be required, by law, to screen asymptomatic children every year. And what happens with the data and information they collect? Nobody knows.

To many, this new mandate will seem like a positive development. They, like the governor, will call it “empowering.” Some will probably call it “lifesaving.” Don’t believe them. This is unethical and wrong. It’s not empowering to be forced to take a school-administered mental health screening every year starting in third grade. On the contrary, it puts kids at great risk. We’ve seen over and over the sort of scenario in which a a kid who is, say, tired and grumpy after a late night at hockey practice gets labeled “suicidal” by some clueless person who is champing at the bit to project pathologies onto students.

Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy, captures it perfectly in her post on X:

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.

This is a profound government overreach into the minds of people’s children and another example of the state adding more nonsense — often driven by ideology — to the already overly full plate of school districts. But in this instance, the nonsense can lead to very real harm. Schools already struggle to teach the basics. In 2024, not a single child tested proficient in math in 80 Illinois public schools. And in 24 other schools, not a single student was proficient in reading. That track record does not inspire confidence, and Pritzker has a lot of nerve expecting parents to subject their children to annual screening by an institution that struggles to do its actual job well.

This trend of nonstop tinkering in the minds of people’s children is not only wildly inappropriate; it has proven to be counterproductive. The more that schools insist that students constantly think about and talk about their feelings, the worse the mental health outcomes seem to get. We have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people than ever before. The very interventions that are supposed to help seem to be doing the opposite — by pathologizing normal emotions and teaching kids to fixate on their inner selves.

Clinical psychologist Dana Weiner, who helped to develop the Illinois program, and the governor himself assert that these mental health screenings are like “vision and hearing screenings” that we already give to kids. Give me a break, guys. Checking a child’s hearing and vision is an objective assessment; screening their mental health is wildly subjective and highly prone to error and bias. The only similarity between these screenings is that parents have the right to opt out of all of them. In the case of the mental health screeners, I’d opt my kids out in a hot second.

Pritzker and his staff will likely do nothing to spread awareness and facilitate the right of parents to opt out — per usual, this responsibility falls to the rest of us. It is vitally important that Illinois parents know that they do not have to subject their children to these invasive screenings. Federal law guarantees them the right to pull the plug on this new state mandate for their own children.

Let’s remember, educators aren’t therapists, and schools are not mental health counseling centers, no matter how much some want them to be. There is zero evidence that schools’ increasing obsession with mental health has made kids better off. On the contrary, the more schools have leaned heavily into mental health, “social emotional learning,” and “trauma-informed pedagogy,” the worse kids feel — anxiety, depression, and self-harm have risen as schools have forced students to look inward and focus on their own emotions and problems. Maybe that’s correlation and not causation, but, either way, it’s certainly not a case for mental health–related mandates starting in third grade.

Children are not the property of the state, and they are not psychological guinea pigs for legislative experiments and presidential aspirations cloaked in compassion and driven by ideology. Recent history tells us that once one state does something like this, additional states with like-minded leadership quickly follow, and suddenly, a new very bad idea takes hold.

And this is a very bad idea that will hurt far more kids than it will help.