Government schools in Oregon have been ordering children in their care to fill out highly intrusive psychiatric and psychological surveys, asking about students’ mental state and experiences. The sensitive questions and the nature of the scheme prompted outrage among parents and activist groups.
Among other questions, students are asked if they ever feel nervous, anxious, or scared. They are also probed on whether they “hear voices” or even see things that others might not. And they are instructed to reveal whether they “had thoughts that kept coming into your mind that you would do something bad?”
Perhaps even more alarming, the questionnaire asks children if they have had an alcoholic drink, smoked tobacco, used drugs including marijuana, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, LSD, heroin, inhalants, solvents, methamphetamine, sleeping pills, prescription pain pills without a doctor’s prescription, and so on.
Suicide also features prominently, with the survey demanding that children reveal whether they have considered killing themselves over the last two weeks, or if they have “EVER” attempted suicide.
The controversial questionnaire, dubbed “DSM-5,” is based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a ubiquitous but widely ridiculed psychiatric “Bible” that classifies virtually everything as some sort of “disorder” invented by psychiatrists. More than a few experts and psychiatrists have warned that every person on the planet could be labeled with some sort of phony “illness” under DSM-5.
The survey, described as a “self-rated cross-cutting symptom measure” for children ages 11 through 17, was created by the American Psychiatric Association, the group behind the DSM-5. It is supposedly designed to help government educators monitor and track the “mental health” of students.
However, it was not immediately clear who authorized the data-gathering scheme, or whether the information would be stored forever in government databases. This particular survey was used in the Marcola School District, and schools are very reluctant to discuss it.
According to concerned parents who reached out to FreedomProject Media, the survey was given to middle-school and high-school students in Marcola. The school counselor was supposedly going to use it to “create supports” for children at the school. It was difficult to opt out and required multiple e-mails and persistence, one mother revealed, blasting the scheme as “highly inappropriate.” Critics and activist leaders expressed outrage, too. “As a nurse, I took one look at it and could not believe what I was seeing, as DSM-5 is a survey used to diagnose & classify mental disorders!” said Josie Alexander with Informed Parents of Oregon, a grassroots group of parents working to protect children from abuses in public schools.
“What was the counselor going to do with this information? Who had access to this information? Did parents get notified? Would this information get put in the child’s permanent record?” she wondered in a statement provided to The Newman Report. “On top of all these questions lets not forget this should be a clinician-administered survey, it is not something that a school counselor is qualified to administer.”
Thanks to federal funding and totalitarian anti-family attitudes among the education establishment, government schools are increasingly trying to monitor and manipulate students’ mental states under the guise of “mental health.” If left unchecked, this Orwellian trend will produce nothing but disaster for children, families, and society at large.
