Psychiatric and Psychological Gold Digging

Ellen Makkai explained the financial motives behind mental health programs: “Government and private grants seduce [school] districts into using these student interrogations, which are then used to convince benefactors that districts need help – the bigger the problems, the bigger the prize.” Edward Freeland, associate director of the Survey Research Center at Princeton University says: “If a district proves itself to be in rough enough shape,” financial faucets open.

One self-esteem consultant in the United States was making up to $10,000 a day, despite no scientific evidence in 20 years that self-esteem programs have ever worked. An “Anger Management for Youth Program” used in schools costs $2,500. A Minnesota-based group that studies children’s behavior and beliefs to identify their “problems” has an annual budget of $10 million. And in one Mexican state, the Education Department paid around $700,000 for a package of U.S. psychological assessments known as the “Little Happy Box” for teachers to use on students – despite education supervisors voting against their implementation.

“Teen screening” targets government insurance, advising school personnel to apply for a grant to secure funds to cover mental health services for students.

Allen Jones, a former investigator at the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, revealed that a comprehensive national policy to screen and treat “mental illness” relies on “expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab.”

Writing in Education Reporter in 2001, Diane Alden, research analyst with a background in political science and economics, revealed, “Before the national self-esteem movement began, kids earned self-esteem or absorbed it naturally from their parents. When they accomplished something, whether or not they received praise for it, they understood that they had done something good. … However, as the sociologists and educrats of the ‘60s applied the psychological theories to the schools, education went downhill. The results have been disastrous. Test scores, reading and math ability of American children have spiraled downward. …As it turns out, more scientists believe that this overblown self-esteem may actually be one of the causes of violence in public schools and elsewhere.”

William Bonner, an attorney for the Rutherford Institute, a U.S. civil liberties organization, says that these programs have led to “a massive invasion of the family and the rights of individual students through curricula utilizing psychological programming and experimentation, as well as a broad spectrum of behavior modification techniques. … The traditional interests and rights of parents have been trampled upon, as educators have proceeded on the proposition that professionals know better than parents how to raise children.”