Around a century ago, the Spanish Flu killed 700,000 people in this country. In terms of casualty count, that pandemic was deadlier than both World Wars, plus the wars in Vietnam and Korea, combined. The average life expectancy in this country dropped by 12 years virtually overnight. Many of the dead were young people.
And yet, as the pandemic subsided, according to historians who have extensively documented this whole episode, life returned to normal in just a couple of years. Society didn’t reorder itself. There were no permanent changes to election law. Mail-in balloting didn’t become the norm. Clusters of effete Leftists in San Francisco and Portland didn’t insist on wearing masks for years afterwards. Things progressed. People moved on.
Fast forward a century to the post-COVID era and, as you may have noticed, the exact opposite happened. Instead of moving on, elected officials have opted to indefinitely extend COVID policies, wherever possible. Some of these efforts are obvious. I just alluded to a few of them. But some of these efforts are not so obvious. In fact they’ve gotten basically no major media coverage whatsoever, even though they could affect your children in profound ways.
In particular, with COVID as the pretext initially, there’s now a large-scale effort underway to transform schools into mini-hospitals, all for the benefit of a handful of startups that are funded out of Silicon Valley. You thought the point of school was to provide an education for your child, but that’s not the case anymore. Now the point is to turn students into patients, in order to enrich investors in California. School is now, supposedly, a one-stop shop for all your children’s educational and medical and psychiatric needs.
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According to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, prior to COVID, there were, “essentially zero” Telehealth appointments for mental-health and substance-related issues. You could look throughout the entire country, and you’d find that it’s just not something that was done. Beginning around March of 2021, though, everything changed. That year, Telehealth technology exploded in popularity. It was used for more than one-third of all outpatient visits for these symptoms. Telehealth went from something no one used, to something more than 33 percent of patients nationwide were participating in. Nothing like that has ever happened before.
Many of these new patients were students, in grades K through 12. As the Associated Press reports this week, “Now at least 16 of the 20 largest U.S. public school districts are offering online therapy sessions to reach millions of students. … In those districts alone, schools have signed provider contracts worth more than $70 million.”
Have you heard about that? Unless you read the AP, probably not. You were never asked to vote on this. It just happened, whether you like it or not. One of the largest Telehealth providers in schools today is called “Hazel Health.” They’re active in more than 150 school districts, across 15 states. Just this year, the AP reports, Hazel signed a $24 million contract with Los Angeles County to provide “tele-therapy” to more than a million students. Hazel has also signed lucrative deals in Hawaii, Nevada, Florida, Texas, Washington, Georgia. A lot of taxpayer money is being spent, all of a sudden, on in-school therapy for kids. Tens of millions more dollars spent by the school system, to go along with the billions that it wastes.
But the bigger issue, beyond the cost of all of this, is that schools shouldn’t be handling any of it in the first place. This is maybe the most egregious example of “mission creep” in modern history. It should go without saying that schools are not hospitals and they’re not mental health facilities. Outside of dealing with minor injuries — which school nurses can handle, and have always been able to handle — schools should not be offering full-service medical care, least of all psychiatric care. They certainly shouldn’t be promoting mental health treatments via the Internet.
This is the biggest problem, and the thing we should all be stopping to think about. Why are schools spending tens of millions of dollars to offer therapy to kids?
It used to be — back in my day — that the school guidance counselor was really just the school’s version of an HR rep for the students. You’d talk to the guidance counselor if you have some kind of issue with another student, or a teacher, or whatever. She would give you a sticker or a coloring book and send you on your way. The guidance counselor’s role was relatively narrow.
But now, increasingly, schools are taking it upon themselves to play shrink. They’re referring children to Zoom calls with anonymous doctors for talk therapy. And parents often have no idea what exactly is being said in these sessions. It’s true that parents have to consent to these Telehealth providers seeing their children, but beyond that, the whole point of the practice is that parents don’t have to come and get their kids. Parents can stay at their jobs. Meanwhile, a Telehealth provider is free to, say, affirm a child’s gender delusions, or misdiagnosis a serious illness.
There are a lot of issues here. One — and not even the biggest one — is the quality of care kids will receive. Time Magazine looked into this back in November of 2022. They reported at the time that,
TIME interviewed six mental-health professionals who formerly worked for telepsych or substance-treatment startups, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they still work in mental-health care. Regardless of their employer, they had similar complaints: appointments were too short to properly treat and assess patients; clinicians were overworked; and policies around prescribing drugs and treating complex cases often weren’t rigorous enough.
TIME also reported that,
Federal investigators are probing prescription practices at Done and Cerebral, a popular startup that offers virtual therapy and medication management for depression, anxiety, insomnia, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and substance-use disorders for as little as $99 per month—and that some former employees have said overprescribes stimulants for ADHD. In May, pharmacy giants including CVS and Walmart stopped filling controlled-substance prescriptions from Cerebral and Done clinicians.
For its part, The Wall Street Journal found that,
Done, run by a former Facebook product manager with no medical training, also advertises heavily on social media. Done’s clinicians continue to prescribe stimulants, sometimes after appointments as short as 10 minutes.
More broadly, when people go to Telehealth providers, they’re often being misdiagnosed. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic looked at around 2,400 patients who underwent a video Telehealth consultation, followed by an in-person visit for the same problem. They found that in 13 percent of cases, the diagnosis didn’t match up. That might not seem like a lot — and indeed, the Mayo Clinic touts this as a positive number. But it’s not. It means that out of just 2,400 people, more than 300 of them were misdiagnosed. That, it would seem to me, is obviously a major problem.
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It’s no secret why these businesses have appeared out of nowhere, and immediately acquired an enormous amount of funding. Children and young adults are experiencing extraordinarily high levels of mental distress in this country. This year alone, more than 60 percent of teenage girls reported feeling persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. The director of the CDC’s school health division, Kathleen Ethier, said that in 30 years of collecting data on depression among young people, “we’ve never seen this kind of devastating, consistent findings.”
When you look at the long-term data, you can see why the CDC is saying that. According to a recent report in Education Week, CDC data shows that,
Forty-two percent of high school students in 2021 reported feeling so sad or hopeless for at least two consecutive weeks in the previous year that they stopped engaging in their usual activities, up from 26 percent in 2009.
So children are more depressed than they’ve been in a very long time. And now they’re being “treated” with a brand-new form of “Telehealth talk therapy” — therapy offered in school — even though there’s very little evidence that talk therapy actually accomplishes anything. Just this year, The New York Times reported that a recent meta-analysis found that, “more than half of the patients receiving therapy [for depression] had little or no benefit.” A 2022 paper out of Germany, meanwhile, determined that, “After more than half a century of research” and “millions of invested funds,” the positive impact of therapy and medication was, “limited.”
In other words, a lot of people relied on therapy to fix their problems, and therapy did absolutely nothing for them. In fact, especially if they were counting on this therapy to fix their issues, it may have made their mental problems even worse. That’s the very thin evidence that supports in-person talk therapy. The evidence supporting Zoom therapy is even more scant. There’s really no reason to think that it helps at all.
So this is another area where we are essentially conducting psychological experiments on children. “Hey let’s see what happens when we have kids sit in therapy sessions with some random person over Zoom! Maybe it will help them, maybe it will screw them up more. Let’s find out!” There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around.
Across the country, many school districts, and many parents, are allowing this to take place. And they’re doing it, ostensibly, because of the widely reported “mental health crisis” with our kids. But the problem is that there’s a lot of confusion about the cause of this crisis. Usually the problem is blamed on an epidemic of “bullying.” I mentioned the AP article about the, as they put it, “booming business of online therapy,” which schools are now turning to, and spending tens of millions of dollars on. That article starts with an anecdote about a young girl who was bullied in school, called fat and ugly, and so she is now in online therapy with whatever therapist her school connected her with. The obvious implication is that this is why we need our schools to increasingly provide psychiatric care to kids. Because of all the bullying that goes on.
But kids have always been bullied. Arguably, if you’ve ever listened to your parents or grandparents talk about their public school horror stories, bullying used to be considerably worse than it is these days. And back then, kids weren’t going to therapy over it. They certainly weren’t going to therapy at school. They also generally weren’t psychologically devastated by the bullying to the same degree that kids today are. Because it is probably true that kids today are more anxious, confused, and depressed than ever before. Childhood suicide used to be basically unheard of. Now it’s a growing epidemic. So something is going on here. There is a major problem. And the schools have come up with all kinds of schemes to allegedly help solve it, which now includes putting millions of kids in therapy during school hours.
But it’s not helping, and it won’t, because the people addressing the mental health crisis don’t understand where it comes from. Here’s where it comes from: What lies behind it is a deliberate effort to psychologically and spiritually destabilize our children. This is an effort that’s been undertaken in large part by the school system itself, which now pretends that it wants to solve the problem that it is actively helping to create. Our children are lost, untethered, vulnerable. That’s why they’re so incapable of coping with the kinds of challenges that kids in the past handled relatively easily. It’s because of the conditioning they’ve been subjected to.
Kids are indoctrinated into a worldview where reality is uncertain, truth doesn’t exist, their own biological identity is fluid and subject to change, their country is evil, their ancestors were bigoted troglodytes. They’re taught to be suspicious of their own families and their parents. For years, they were told to stay inside, and not talk to anyone, because they might spread a virus that had a minuscule chance of causing them any harm whatsoever. If they’re white, they are taught to hate their own race. If male, to hate their own sex. They are severed from all anchors of meaning and purpose, and then we look around and wonder why they’re all so depressed. Then we send them to therapists who invariably will enforce the indoctrination that put them in this state of psychological distress in the first place.
But schools aren’t even doing that, really. They’re not bothering to refer kids to the psychiatrist’s office. Now schools are simply putting iPads in front of childrens’ faces, and connecting them with TikTok nurses who will affirm every delusion they have. They’re doing this allegedly to save parents some time, but in reality it’s about making a few Big Tech startups a lot of money, and about solidifying the indoctrination they’re getting in school.
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And so far, parents are going along with it.
In school districts all over the country, they’re handing their kids over to Zoom shrinks while they stay at work. All the while, they’ll just have to hope that their children don’t get the wrong diagnosis, or receive a prescription for some drug they don’t need, or end up with more mental problems than they already had.
We’re told this is the future of medicine. And whether you like it or not, whether you consented to it or not, it’s probably on its way to your child’s school.