In March of 2024, Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation which became an instant best seller and sparked a national conversation about the alarming rise in childhood mental health issues. Haidt said the explosion began in 2010 and posited that the primary “causes” were rises in the use of digital technologies, overprotective parenting styles and the lack of play based or hands-on childhood experiences.
While he’s not wrong, there is a lot more to this story and we will attempt to connect a whole lot of dots for our readers to better understand all the factors that are contributing to declining adolescent mental health outcomes and to share meaningful solutions in the process. This article is the first of what will be a multi-part series. We hope it will be helpful, and we welcome thoughtful comments from our readers.
First: What’s the problem?
Haidt compiled considerable data to document that mental health in young people has become an international crisis. His team collected the citations and abstracts of the published articles that shed light on these topics on open-source Google Docs: one collection on adolescent mental health trends and another on the impact of social media on youth mental health. He provided the following charts on the United States which will be our demographic focus:
The explosion began in 2010 (which coincides with the explosion in the availability of cell phones, internet access and social media use) which we will also address in a later post.
Most of the mental health issues are self-reports of internalized issues.
It is hitting our younger generations much harder than any older generations.
Young girls are especially vulnerable to committing acts of self-harm, short of suicide.
Young boys commit self-harm by taking their own lives at an alarming rate.
So, we indeed have some serious indicators.
So much so that 23 states are now actively pursuing or expanding educational legislation to fully fund and integrate School Based Mental Health Centers and dedicated Mental Health Clinics in public schools. This significant shift in education focus requires serious examination, because the ramifications are profound.
For example, wealthy NGO lobbyists are driving the mental health shift. They are groups such as the American School Counselors Association (ASCA) the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), the School Based Health Alliance (SBHA) and the National Association for Mental Health (NAMI). This raises serious red flags, because every one of these groups has been fully captured by radical gender, racial and equity ideologies. To be “fully captured” means adopting and promoting the perspective that every child is viewed through the lens of equity, privilege and oppressor or victim identities. Which means the counselors and behavioral psychologists hired and placed in our schools will be viewing and treating every student through the same lens.
While this series will not focus on unraveling all the complicated and deliberately obscure funding mechanisms that drive the shift toward a prominent mental health focus in schools, we have to recognize that the most recent reauthorization (2015) of the massive federal education legislation, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), set the stage and funded this transition. Over a decade ago in the private rooms of Congress, lobbyists for the NGOs mentioned above fashioned that framework—out of public sight and mind. Through massive federal education grants, the federal ESSA drives states to implement:
Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
Multitiered systems of support (MTSS)
School-based mental health clinics
Universal (all students) mental and behavioral screening
Comprehensive school mental and behavioral health services
SEL is a psycho-social behavioral intervention framework masquerading as “academic” instruction. It views every child through an equity lens. It views our entire culture and government through a lens of oppression or privilege. It is embedded into every classroom at every grade level in every subject.
MTSS (Multi-tiered System of Support) is the structure supporting Social Emotional Learning (SEL) which we have warned and written about extensively. It is the method of continual data collection of students’ feelings, values, attitudes and beliefs that is often invasive, inappropriate and outside the proper authority of schools. With this data, MTSS builds a portable and sharable “profile” of each child which then uses AI to identify “interventions” that should be adopted to steer the child toward what the “experts” consider the correct path of thinking, believing, and feeling. In this system, EVERY single public-school child is subjected to a mental health evaluation at the start of each school year. This is called “comprehensive” screening.
In fact, all current and proposed state legislation closely “aligns” all clinical services with the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), identifying it as “best practices.” Counseling and interventions not structured around MTSS are considered “random” or “arbitrary.” Talk therapy which helps gender confused children accept their biological sex would be considered random and arbitrary because it is not a “best practice.”
What parents are facing today is that many legislators, school board members and influencers are jumping on the mental health bandwagon in good faith. They believe we need to generously fund mental health in schools with our tax dollars in order to solve the mental health crisis of our youth.
What they unfortunately haven’t yet seen or understood is that much of the declining mental health of our children directly correlates to the disturbing sexual, gender and racial ideology schools are teaching and which the mental health industry has adopted. It’s hiring wolves to guard sheep!
Since we are subject matter experts in SEL, Cultural Marxism, DEI, CRT, Comprehensive Sex and Gender Ideology, this series will connect some of these “dots” and demonstrate how this system is set up to destabilize families and destabilize and control our children, which will ultimately destabilize and fundamentally transform our nation.
We will show you how mental health clinics in our schools, which operate through the flawed and dangerous lens of equity, racism, oppression and gender confusion, will only feed the mental health crisis in our youth.
Because it is like pouring gasoline on the flames of the very same ideologies already devastating our children, leading to more damage and more destruction.
It’s completely naïve to think otherwise.
Part 2 will explore how the culture war against reality has attacked the fundamental identities of our children. It has directly impacted their innate sense of value, worth and meaning and consequently their mental health.