Virginia’s Proposed Mental Health Screenings May Do More Harm Than Good

After winning all three chambers in the 2025 state election, Virginia Democrats have introduced a bill, HB355, that would require annual mental health screenings for all public school students in grades 6 through 12 beginning in the 2028-2029 school year. 

Mental health screenings might seem like unobjectionable health interventions at first glance to many parents—after all, many states mandate other health interventions like scoliosis screenings in gym class—but they can, in fact, serve as a red herring for ideology that is intended to sow discord between parents and children and insert the state into what should be family matters.

Abigail Shrier investigates this in her book, Bad Therapy. She writes, “Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students.” 

The first is that overscreening leads to overdiagnosis. A mental health questionnaire given by a school might ask students seemingly benign questions like, “Do you feel sad sometimes?” A student who responds in the affirmative might be flagged at risk for clinical depression—even though “feeling sad sometimes” is a normal part of the human condition. 

From there, the student might be referred to a therapist, who then encourages the student’s parents to take him to a psychiatrist, who then prescribes him with clinical antidepressants—all because a child, likely not understanding the long line of treatment this will mean, responded honestly to feeling sad like any normal person occasionally does. A conversation that should begin between parents and their child is artificially forced by a school screening, and can lead children down a path of protracted medical treatment. This isn’t to say that psychiatric treatment is necessarily bad—in some cases, it is, in fact, necessary—but rather that schools should not be putting children on the track for medical treatment on psychiatric matters. Psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances warns against overscreening that puts people on this track in his book, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, recommending, “Mental disorders should be diagnosed only when the presentation is clear-cut, severe, and clearly not going away on its own.”

There is another problem created by contemporary therapy culture, which is the lack of resilience it produces among patients, in part because the field has been infiltrated by ideologues. As psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert wrote for City Journal, “Graduate programs are no longer producing healers, but political activists with therapy licenses. Instead of teaching students to treat anxiety, depression, or relationship issues using evidence-based methods, many programs now encourage trainees to develop ‘critical consciousness.’ That means guiding clients to interpret their distress through the lens of systemic oppression, rather than addressing individual agency, patterns, or choices.” 

There is no concept of human agency in such a framework, which is all too often pushed by school therapists. In a school setting, this can convince a student to believe that something is deeply wrong with herself, leading her to wallow in self-pity and potentially latch onto a diagnosis as an identity category. For example, if she checks the box for “gets anxious sometimes” on a mental health screening might get accommodations such as extra time on tests for her supposed disability. But this stops her from developing the tools to work past her problems, and makes her develop her identity of herself as someone who suffers from clinical anxiety, as opposed to someone who is able to overcome anxious tendencies in the absence of overdiagnosis.

Again, neither therapy nor psychiatry are inherently bad. But when schools encourage mental health surveys that fast track children toward therapists and psychiatrists, they are not doing so out of profound concern for children; they are doing so because they believe that parents are not to be trusted, in fundamental defiance of parental rights in education. Parents—not teachers, not school counselors, not school nurses—are the first and fundamental authority not only in their children’s education, but in their children’s upbringing and medical care. 

For this reason, parents should opt out of mental health surveys and remain vigilant as to what probing questions their children are being asked in school. These are at once medical interventions and ideological interference in a child’s life and should not be anywhere near a public school.