Back in the 1990s, schools used a mental health screening tool called TeenScreen. Most people didn’t realize these screenings often produced false positives—flagging children for mental health problems when none existed.
Today, with the rise of the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS-B) in public schools, the focus on children’s mental health has only grown. But what has it actually produced?
In New Hampshire, school counselors have been pressured to give personally identifiable student mental health data to Keene State BHII, an outside contractor hired by the NH Department of Education. BHII compiles the information, creates a glossy “report,” and sends it to the federal government. The result reads more like a marketing brochure than independent research—no peer review, no rigorous science.
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The history here matters. Harvard Medical School lecturer Marcia Angell, in her book The Truth About Drug Companies, revealed TeenScreen’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry—calling it “just a way to put more people on prescription drugs.” In 2003, President Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health recommended TeenScreen for all 52 million American children and adolescents. Fourteen of its 22 members had drug industry ties.
False positives are not hypothetical. One mother described how her daughter came home from school “diagnosed” with serious mental health problems after a 10-minute screening.
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Now, with schools functioning as de facto mental health clinics—staffed by unqualified “pseudo-psychologists”—behavior problems have spiraled, teachers are leaving the profession, and taxpayers are footing the bill. Instead of targeting resources to children with genuine, serious needs, schools cast a mental health net over every student. From Social and Emotional Learning to costly outside therapy services, the expansion is endless—yet none of it is meaningfully measured for effectiveness.
Illinois has just announced it will begin mental health screening for all public school students. What could go wrong? Plenty. Those who don’t know the history of TeenScreen may be walking right back into the same experiment—this time on a much larger scale.
Treating serious mental health conditions is vital. But when resources are spent on large-scale screening of well-adjusted, happy children—often just for normal misbehavior—the results can be worse than the problem. At what point will parents ask whether the school itself is creating mental health problems that didn’t exist before? And how long before other states follow Illinois?
Time will tell.
