Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Ill.) recently signed a bill that would “implement annual mental health screenings” in Illinois public schools beginning in third grade, starting during the 2027-28 school year.
Parents can opt out — and they all should.
For over a half-century, psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz warned of “The Myth of Mental Illness” — the tendency by social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists to transmogrify patients’ problems into supposed mental illnesses for which there is no chemical, neurological or physiological evidence.
These supposed mental illnesses are then treated, often for a lifetime, with drugs and therapy, leaving behind dependent or ruined lives in which the patients are seen as not responsible for their behaviors.
Dependency is the most frequent outcome. Additional consequences include unproductive and unhappy lives. Illegal acts by these patients are additionally excused by exculpations such as insanity pleas or mitigated punishment.
Szasz argued that mental illness was far too easily diagnosed and impossible to disprove, as it often has no markers. The only way to deny mental illness is to muster expert consensus — difficult when mental health colleagues have already validated it.
Suggestibility, spoken about as “self-fulfilling prophesy,” is a favorite concept in persuasion in rhetorical theory, and one about which Szasz spoke often. I worked with Szasz as a friend and scholar and even published with him.
Szasz, famous or infamous for his criticisms of false positive diagnoses of mental illness, would not be surprised by Pritzker’s initiative.
Journalist Abigail Shrier, in a strong piece — but one that lacked any attribution to Szasz — criticizes the dangers of Pritzker’s diagnostic plan, which includes items such as, “In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?”
Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned,” Shrier points out. “Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed — ‘How about now? Are you sure?’ — and he just might decide that he is.”
Shrier points out that, in the end, there is no reduction in mental illness pursuant to the use of the new system. Here, perhaps, she is not skeptical enough. The incidence of “mental illness” in children is a made-up system, taking a small number of highly problematic lives and exacerbating children’s difficulties by labeling them as pathological and putting them into a system that makes them worse and their putative problems permanent.
As Szasz used to say to me, “Give me any person whose life is stressed, and I can successfully diagnose them as mentally ill.” With children, it is even easier.
Richard E. Vatz is a distinguished professor emeritus of political rhetoric at Towson University. He is the author of “The Only Authentic Book of Persuasion.”
