Chris Evans, Carolyn D. Gorman
Widespread screening does, however, produce alarmingly high rates of false positives, leading to harmful misdiagnoses. One study published by Cambridge University showed a false-positive rate as high as 90 percent. That’s why Virginians (and all Americans) should push back against efforts to introduce universal mental-health screenings in schools.
In recent years, school districts across the country have begun requiring students to answer personal questions about emotions, behaviors, and suicidal thoughts. The practice has become widespread, with at least one-third of schools reporting that they administer mental-health screenings. Last year Illinois became the first state to mandate that all schools administer universal screenings to students in third through twelfth grade.
Most students that such screenings flag as “at risk” are merely feeling the normal stresses of life, so the scrutiny often leads to unwarranted labeling and intervention. By design, screening interprets emotions through a medical lens, construing any sign of anxiousness, inattention, or distress as a potential clinical disorder. But there’s simply no foolproof way to confirm mental-health disorders—no biomarkers, blood tests, or brain scans. Ordinary worry can easily be misconstrued as anxiety disorder, sadness as clinical depression.
Serious mental illnesses causing functional impairment affect only about 5 percent of Americans, and these conditions typically don’t develop until the late teens and early twenties. If America’s nearly 50 million public school kids were screened annually for rare conditions, the majority flagged would be false positives, leading potentially to millions of children being wrongly shuffled into the mental-health system.