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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, August 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Trump sends in the National Guard to clear out D.C.’s homeless encampments. A neglected Biden-era immigration hotline may hold the key to rescuing missing migrant children. And more.
But first: Abigail Shrier on the danger of asking kids if they’re depressed.
While I was writing my book Bad Therapy, my middle school–aged son returned home from sleepaway camp with a persistent stomachache.
I took him to urgent care, where a nurse asked me to leave the room so he could administer a mental health screening tool put out by our National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Afterward, I requested a copy of the survey and photographed it. Here, verbatim, are the five questions the nurse intended to ask my son in private:
1. In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?
2. In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?
3. In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?
4. Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When?
5. Are you thinking of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.
Children across America are being asked these questions by doctors. Because this is explicit protocol from the National Institute of Mental Health: Ask parents to leave so that you can administer the following questions to kids, ages eight and up, who may have not shown any signs of mental distress.
There are so many problems with this. The main one is: Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned. Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed—How about now? Are you sure?—and he just might decide that he is.
Now, thanks to Illinois governor JB Pritzker, tens of thousands of Illinois kids will be encouraged to think of themselves as sick. Many or most will be false positives.
Read my piece:
—Abigail Shrier
If kids are suffering from overdiagnosis, many of the homeless people on our streets—and almost one in five homeless individuals have psychotic conditions—suffer from a policy regime that allows them literally to die in plain sight.
Donald Trump thinks he has a solution. He recently signed an executive order that makes it easier to impose psychiatric care on homeless people who suffer from severe mental illness.
Dr. Sally Satel is a psychiatrist who knows this problem intimately and says she largely agrees with Trump’s executive order if—and that’s a big if—he carries it out properly.
We got a taste of how it might play out yesterday when President Trump announced that he is putting the Washington, D.C., police under federal control and deploying the National Guard, and part of their mandate will include clearing homeless encampments.
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