Using Schools to Create a Mental Health State

Clifford Beers, a former psychiatric patient, formed the National Committee on Mental Hygiene in the United Kingdom in 1909. The Committee’s “Program for the Prevention of Delinquency” helped create “child guidance clinics” (psychiatric counseling) around the globe; it was the driving force behind the entry of mental hygiene concepts into schools. “If we are going to prevent dependency, delinquency, insanity, and general inadequacy,” wrote Ralph Truitt, the head of the Committee’s Division of Child Guidance Clinics in 1927, “.[T]he school should be the focus of our attack.”

And attacked it was. Sixty years later, in a report to the U.S. Secretary of Education, the National Commission on Excellence in Education stated, “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

What the Commission did not realize was that an attack on the school system had been launched and was still in operation. Proclaiming the strategic objectives of global psychiatry before Britain’s National Council of Mental Hygiene in 1940, psychiatrist John R. Rees, who would soon after co-found the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), left no doubt that he and his peers had their sights set on education: “[W]e have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine.” [Emphasis added]

Another WFMH cofounder, psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, furthered the attack by using schools to eliminate morals: “The training of children is making a thousand neurotics for every one that psychiatry can hope to help with psychotherapy,” he said in 1945. “We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers. …If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

At a WFMH inaugural conference, psychiatrists identified the family unit, long the primary stabilizing influence of society as a target for direct assault: “The family is now one of the major obstacles to improved mental health, and hence should be weakened, if possible, so as to free individuals and especially children from the coercion of family life.”

In the 1960s and `70s, psychological programs: known collectively as Outcome Based Education (OBE) were introduced into schools. Psychiatrists and psychologists, who directed the philosophy of OBE, claimed that three sources of stress had to be eliminated from schools: 1) school failure 2) a curriculum centered around academics and 3) disciplinary procedures. School failure was the chief villain, they said, leading to “feelings of inferiority,” behavior problems like truancy and an unsocial attitude.

Arm in arm, psychology and psychiatry set the stage for the collapse of education at a profit to them. In 1962, they received nearly a billion dollars in the United States alone for their role in education.

By 2002, funds channeled to them through “special education” for psychiatrist-defined “learning disabilities” had reached $28 billion (€22.4 billion). However, the U.S. Department of Education found that 40% of the children being spuriously labeled with these “disorders” had simply never been taught to read.

Preaching their false and disturbing creed, the new “behaviorists” have successfully insinuated themselves into positions of authority in schools and completed an almost total overthrow of education. As a result, our once strong and effective scholastic-based systems have been seriously compromised, and with them, the impressive results of better years.

Author and educator Beverly Eakman states, “Most people today suspect that education is not really about literacy, ‘basics,’ or proficiency at anything. What is less well understood is that there exists in this country, and indeed throughout the industrialized world, what can best be described as an ‘Illiteracy Cartel’ – ostensibly aimed at furthering ‘mental health.’ This cartel derives its power from those who stand to benefit financially and politically from ignorance and educational malpractice; from the frustration, the crime, the joblessness and social chaos that mis-education produces.”