How Schools Should Approach Mental Health (with Carolyn D. Gorman)

There's another thought.

I hear this a lot from my friends on the right, that there's some kind of Trojan horse school mental health initiative function going on where it introduces students to a range of, you know, politically or culturally loaded ideas.

And this is just sort of like the deep education state indoctrinating.

How valid do you think that concern is? And if there's something to it, is it sort of a calculated thing or is it just sort of the way ideas flow through these systems?

Unfortunately, I think it is valid.

The professional associations for mental health practitioners are not shy about this.

They post on their websites their public policy statements.

their statements of support and what they support and what they support is typically these types of progressive ideology ideas that have been talked about a lot in the kind of culture war conversations, things like gender, things like race.

social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, a lot of that ends up having a race element to it.

And so, unfortunately, that is something...

That does not seem to really even be hidden by professionals.

Of course, on the individual level, things are different.

Like, not every mental health professional is going to be promoting these ideas in schools.

But their professional associations are telling them that that's best practice.

So it's something that I think parents especially should consider.

at least be aware of, because what parents don't seem to be aware of is that school mental health professionals like counselors, like school psychologists, they're not actually licensed to provide behavioral health care.

they are credentialed simply by the education system.

And so they don't have to meet the same regulatory obligations that professionals in community settings or private practice would have to face.

The healthcare system and the education system have different rules, different laws around student privacy, different practices, and those can be in conflict when we deliver these services through schools.

And in one fundamental way, we really do not have any systematic tracking of whether parental consent is being met and enforced.

So you might have told the school that you don't want your child to participate in these programs, but if they're universal, it's really hard for that to actually be applied.

And there's really no way to know if that's happening or not.