Invasive screenings risk false psychiatric labels, dangerous drugging, and the erosion of parents’ constitutional rights. Subjective questionnaires like the PHQ-9 inflate mental disorders, driving psychotropic prescriptions, and undermining parental informed consent.
By Jan Eastgate
President, CCHR International
August 29, 2025
- The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends mental health screening from birth to age 21, pathologizing normal childhood behaviors under “mental, emotional and behavioral disorders.”
- Subjective depression screening tools like the PHQ-9, funded by Pfizer to market antidepressants, inflate diagnoses and drive prescriptions, despite psychiatry’s own admissions of diagnostic unreliability.
- Evidence shows screenings do not improve outcomes: studies confirm they fail to reduce suicide or improve adolescent mental health, while fueling false positives and misdiagnosis rates that can be as high as 71%.
- Youth drugging is already epidemic: over 6 million American children are prescribed psychotropics—including antidepressants, addictive anti-anxiety drugs, and stimulants akin to cocaine.
- Parents’ constitutional rights are at stake: mandated or coerced screening undermines informed consent and erodes families’ freedom to protect their children from psychiatric labeling and drugging. Opting out their children for mental health screening in kindergartens and schools is one legal protection to consider.
CCHR is recommending that parents shield their children from invasive mental health screening in schools. To assist families, CCHR provides a downloadable Parent’s Exemption Form Prior to Mental Health and Psychological Screening or Counseling and highlights a federal law prohibiting schools from coercing parents to medicate their child as a condition of remaining in class.
This call follows a troubling trend of states enforcing mental health screening, most recently Illinois, which now requires annual psychiatric screenings beginning in third grade (ages 8–9). In August, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) also issued a clinical report on screening for mental health, claiming children as young as two may have mental health, emotional, and behavioral problems (collectively known as MEB) and that between 37% and 39% will have an MED diagnosed by age 16.[1]
Journalist Matt Walsh warns that with screening, “completely normal childhood behaviors and feelings will be reclassified as symptoms of major mental health disorders.”[2]
Indeed, AAP already reports that in 2019, approximately 25% of all children ages 12 to 17 years reported receiving mental health services, including 78% of children labeled with depression receiving treatment (which would likely include antidepressants).
In 2022, AAP astoundingly recommended—and endorses in 2025—assessment for “psychosocial/behavioral concerns” beginning at the newborn visit through to the 21-year visit—recommendations it says align with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. It also recommends depression and suicide screening beginning at 12 years of age.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) also recommended annual screening for anxiety in youths ages 8 to 18, which was endorsed by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)—a group funded by pharmaceutical companies, including manufacturers of antidepressants.[3] In 2015, AFSP CEO Robert Gebbia announced their goal was to reduce the annual suicide rate by 20% by 2025.[4] Between 2016 and 2022, there were more than 221 million antidepressant prescriptions for teenagers 12–17 and young adults 18–25 years of age. Overall, the monthly antidepressant prescription rate in youth increased by 66.3%.[5] By 2022, about 4.5% of U.S. adolescents and young adults, ages 12 to 25, had received a prescription for an antidepressant.[6]
According to AAP, by 2020, suicide was the second leading cause of death in youth ages 10 to 14 years and the third leading cause of death in those aged 15 to 24 years.[7]
The fact is, since 2014, mental health among America’s youth has only gotten worse. Despite the aggressive expansion of screening and treatment of children and adolescents, the results speak for themselves: more children are being labeled, drugged, and funneled into psychiatric treatment, yet rates of suicide and poor mental health outcomes have worsened, not improved.
Parental Rights at Risk
Mandated or even voluntary school screenings risk further worsening this, and will usurp parental informed consent rights to direct their child’s health and education, especially where there is misinformation about their ineffectiveness. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has long recognized parents’ fundamental liberty interest under the Constitution to direct the care and upbringing of their children. Parents, not schools, hold the constitutionally protected right to make healthcare decisions for their children.[8]
The PHQ-9: A Marketing Tool, Not a Science
One likely screening tool is the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), created and funded by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to promote its antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline). Pfizer marketing executive Howard Kroplick admitted: “It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me.” Once doctors adopted the PHQ-9, many became more “comfortable” prescribing antidepressants, despite these drugs putting children and teens at risk of suicide.[9]
Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, architect of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), helped design the PHQ-9 questions with Pfizer’s backing.[10] Yet, he admitted to the unreliability of any psychiatric diagnosis: “To say that we’ve solved the reliability problems is just not true.” Furthermore, “it’s not clear how to solve the problem.”[11]
The DSM itself has been discredited. In 2013, Dr. Thomas Insel, then Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), conceded psychiatric diagnoses “lack validity” and are based on “consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.”[12] Award-winning investigative journalist Kelly Patricia O’Meara, in her compelling new book, Still Psyched Out: And Nobody is Getting Better, adds, “for the psychiatric community, confirmation of objective, confirmable abnormalities in the brain have never been a scientific standard to be met when considering what constitutes mental illness.”[13]
The PHQ-9’s nine questions are so vague and unreliable that anyone’s normal experiences can be wrongly labeled as signs of depression. A score of just five “yes” answers within two weeks is enough to trigger psychotropic drug prescriptions.[14]
The nine-question checklist sentences are:
- Little interest or pleasure in doing things
- Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless
- Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much
- Feeling tired or having little energy
- Poor appetite or overeating
- Feeling bad about yourself — or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down
- Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television
- Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or the opposite — being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual
- Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way[15]
Evidence of Harm
- A 2017 review found no evidence that screening children improves mental health outcomes and warned of potential harms and wasted resources.[16]
- A 2022 Preventive Medicine study confirmed depression screening in adolescents does not reduce suicidal behavior.[17]
- Providers misdiagnose depression 66% of the time and generalized anxiety disorder 71% of the time.[18]
- Screening questionnaires are often influenced by pharmaceutical companies that manufacture psychotropic drugs or by psychiatrists with conflicts of interest with drug makers, which is scientific deception.
- Psychiatrist Vivek Datta, a clinical and forensic neuropsychiatrist, cautioned that over-screening can lead to the “pathologization of normal human experiences” and convinces people they are sick when they are not.[19]
- Nearly one-third of the nation’s K-12 U.S. public schools already offer mental health screening for students, with most offering in-person treatment or referral to a community mental health professional if a student is identified as having depression or anxiety.[20] CCHR believes mental health questionnaires are based on a subjective and unscientific diagnostic system, which funnels children into a pipeline of psychiatric drugging—substances that can be addictive, damage the heart, and even drive them to suicide—and potentially electroshock.
Dr. Allen Frances, former chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, is blunt: “Accumulating evidence makes clear how ineffective and harmful are almost all the highly touted screening tests.” Encouraging mental health screening for children, he added, “is unsupported by scientific evidence and amounts to a reckless public health experiment on children.”[21] He further explained: “Misplaced diagnostic exuberance has turned age-appropriate immaturity into a psychiatric disease and treats it with a pill, rather than just letting the kid grow up.”[22]
Specifically about depression screening, Frances all stated: “The theory sounds great – identify those with depression early and treat them so as to reduce both the lifetime burden of illness and the risk of suicide. The trouble is that this would be an absolute disaster in practice – worsening the existing paradox of overtreating people who are essentially well….”[23]
The evidence shows that screening has not safeguarded children’s well-being but has instead escalated false diagnoses and the medicalization of normal childhood behavior.
A History of Failed Screening
The dangers are not theoretical. The TeenScreen questionnaire, once widely used in U.S. schools and developed by a psychiatrist with financial links to antidepressant makers, had a false-positive rate of 84%, sending countless teens onto antidepressants. Within a year of federal promotion for schoolwide mental health screening, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its strongest “black box” warning that these drugs could double the risk of suicidal thoughts in youth. TeenScreen was abandoned in 2012.[24]
Screening for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is equally subjective and unscientific. A 2023 Journal of Attention Disorders study confirmed high false-positive rates.[25] Psychiatrist Dr. Niall McLaren remarked, “The labels are so loose you could diagnose a ham sandwich with inattentive-type ADHD.”[26] He further states that psychiatry’s goal “is to medicalize everything they can get their pudgy hands on.” “The so-called driving force in psychiatry has been the drugs.”[27]
Drugging the Next Generation
Today, more than 6 million American children are on psychotropic drugs:
- 2.15 million on antidepressants,
- 1.15 million on addictive anti-anxiety drugs, and
- 3.15 million on stimulants with abuse potential similar to cocaine.[28]
Researchers from the Nordic Cochrane Centre, reviewing 70 trials, concluded that antidepressants double aggression and suicide risk in youth.[29] GlaxoSmithKline’s own data later exposed that its antidepressant Paxil was neither safe nor effective for adolescents.[30]
Stimulants prescribed to treat ADHD are called “kiddy cocaine.” The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says that “neither animals nor humans can tell the difference between cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine or methylphenidate…” and methylphenidate [Ritalin] produces “effects nearly identical to cocaine.”[31]
Kelly O’Meara makes the observation, “If methylphenidate and amphetamine are nearly identical to cocaine in their effect, how can the use of one substance be illegal and deserving of jail time and the other ‘nearly identical’ substance legal and considered medicinally helpful?”[32]
She points out the obvious, that “despite more than a hundred years of research by NIMH, the APA [American Psychiatric Association] and every other mental health organization on the planet, psychiatry has no clue about what causes depression, anxiety, or any of the other alleged mental disorders. Furthermore, don’t forget that the pharmaceutical companies are just as clueless as to how their drugs ‘work’ in the brain for any mental disorder…. They don’t call excessive and dangerous drugging of a child criminal. It’s a ‘pharmaceutical misadventure.’”[33]
Psychiatric screening based on the DSM is a key factor in this problem that endangers children’s well-being.
Constitutional Freedoms Undermined
Mental health screening, especially when mandated, undermines parental authority and democratic freedoms. As Vera Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection warned: such screening programs leave “no room for individual choice—or the freedom for parents to say no to psychotropic drugs for their children.”[34]
Congressman Ron Paul put it plainly: “Government health care mandates undermine the basic principles of a free society” by dictating what care families must accept.[35]
School officials and lawmakers must reject psychiatric screening in schools and the recommendation to screen from birth onward. Far from protecting children, these programs risk false labeling, dangerous psychotropic-drugging, and stripping parents of their constitutionally protected right to direct their child’s care. The evidence shows: these screens do not improve outcomes—but they do expose children to serious harm.
Sample of Other States With Mental Health Screening Laws in Schools
New Jersey
Mental health screenings are required in schools, with the state providing resources and logistical support to carry them out.[36]
Colorado
In 2023, the Sixth Through Twelfth Grade Mental Health Screening Act created a program under the Behavioral Health Administration, allowing public schools (grades 6–12) to conduct screenings. Screeners must notify parents if follow-up services are recommended.[37]
Louisiana
Senate Bill 121 (Act 469), effective August 1, 2025, requires all public schools—including charters unless exempt—to offer annual mental health screenings for students in grades K–12. The law includes provisions for parental consent, confidentiality, data destruction, and limits on the use of screening results.[38]
[1] “Promoting Optimal Development: Screening for Mental Health, Emotional, and Behavioral Problems: Clinical Report,” American Academy of Pediatrics, 25 Aug. 2025
[2] Matt Walsh, “The Fake ‘Mental Health’ Test Coming to Your Child’s School,” Daily Wire, 11 Aug. 2025, https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-fake-mental-health-test-coming-to-your-childs-school
[3] Martha Rosenberg, “Stop Suicide By Helping Big Pharma, Says Shady Suicide Prevention Group,” Counterpunch, 23 Aug. 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/23/stop-suicide-by-helping-big-pharma-says-shady-suicide-prevention-group/; https://www.cchrint.org/issues/psycho-pharmaceutical-front-groups/afsp/
[4] https://www.cchrint.org/issues/psycho-pharmaceutical-front-groups/afsp/
[5] “Trends in Antidepressant Prescriptions for Adolescents and Young Adults Around the COVID-19 Pandemic Free,” AAP Journals, 24 Feb. 2024, https://publications.aap.org/journal-blogs/blog/28366/Trends-in-Antidepressant-Prescriptions-for?autologincheck=redirected
[6] https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/07/antidepressants-for-kids-and-teens–what-the-science-says.html
[7] Op. cit., American Academy of Pediatrics
[8] “Medical Rights for Teens and Kids: When Parents Decide and When They Don’t,” GovFacts, https://govfacts.org/explainer/medical-rights-for-teens-and-kids-when-parents-decide-and-when-they-dont/
[9] Chuck Sigler, D.Phil., “Overdiagnosing Depression with the PHQ,” Faith Seeking Understanding, 13 June 2023, https://faith-seeking-understanding.org/2023/06/13/overdiagnosing-depression-with-the-phq/; Olivia Goldhill, “How a depression test devised by a Zoloft marketer became a crutch for a failing mental health system,” STAT News, 21 Feb. 2023, https://www.statnews.com/2023/02/21/depression-test-phq9-zoloft-pfizer-mental-health/
[10] Ibid. Chuck Sigler, D.Phil., “Overdiagnosing Depression with the PHQ.”
[11] https://www.cchrint.org/cchrs-exposure-of-antidepressant-risks-false-marketing-of-the-chemical-imbalance-theory/, citing Alix Spiegel, “The Dictionary of Disorder: How one man revolutionized psychiatry,” The New Yorker, 4 Jan. 2005
[12] Thomas Insel, “Transforming Diagnosis,” NIMH Website, 20 Apr. 2013, https://psychrights.org/2013/130429NIMHTransformingDiagnosis.htm
[13] Kelly Patricia O’Meara, Still Psyched Out: And Nobody is Getting Better, (Vindicta Publishing, Las Vegas, Chicago, 2025), p. 23, https://www.amazon.com/Still-Psyched-Out-Nobody-Getting/dp/159211539X
[14] Matt Walsh, “The Fake ‘Mental Health’ Test Coming to Your Child’s School,” Daily Wire, 11 Aug. 2025, https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-fake-mental-health-test-coming-to-your-childs-school
[15] https://www.apa.org/depression-guideline/patient-health-questionnaire.pdf
[16] Michelle Roseman, et al., “Depression Screening and Health Outcomes in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review,” Can J Psychiatry, 29 Aug. 2017, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5714120/
[17] Kira E. Riehm, et al., “Emergency health services use and medically-treated suicidal behaviors following depression screening among adolescents: A longitudinal cohort study,” Preventive Medicine, Vol 161, Aug. 2022, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091743522001979; Marcus A. Banks, “Depression Screens Do Not Reduce Suicidal Acts in Teens: Study,” Medscape, 8 July 2022, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/976839
[18] Monica Vermani, et al., “Rates of Detection of Mood and Anxiety Disorders in Primary Care: A Descriptive, Cross-Sectional Study,” Prim Care Companion CNS Disorders, 2011;13(2) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3184591/
[19] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/10/21/child-mental-health-screening-is-scientific-deception/; Vivek Datta, “Why Screening Everyone for Depression is a Terrible Idea,” MIA, 29 Jan. 2016, https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/01/why-screening-everyone-for-depression-is-a-terrible-idea/; https://profiles.ucsf.edu/vivek.datta
[20] “One-third of U.S. public schools mandate mental health checks for students,” News Medical, 18 July 2025, https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250718/One-third-of-US-public-schools-mandate-mental-health-checks-for-students.aspx
[21] Allen J. Frances, M.D., “The Obama Plan: Spending MH Money In The Wrong Places: Preventive psychiatry won’t make our kids safer,” Psychology Today, 11 Apr. 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving-normal/201304/the-obama-plan-spending-mh-money-in-the-wrong-places
[22] Allen Frances, MD, “12 Ways Parents Can Protect Their Kids From Too Many Pills,” Huffington Post, 2 Oct. 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/12-ways-parents-can-prote_b_5888392
[23] Allen Francis, M.D. “Screen everyone for depression? Good intention, very bad idea,” New Scientist, 26 Jan. 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075249-screen-everyone-for-depression-good-intention-very-bad-idea/#ixzz7WVYYdH8b
[24] Vera Sherav, “TeenScreen Operations Have Shut Down,” Health Impact News, 21 Nov. 2012, https://healthimpactnews.com/2012/teenscreen-operations-have-shut-down/
[25] https://www.cchrint.org/2025/03/07/protecting-parental-rights-against-screening/; “ADHD Tests Lead to Mass Overdiagnosis, Researchers Warn,” MAD, 4 Dec. 2023, citing: Allyson G. Harrison and Melanie J. Edwards, “The Ability of Self-Report Methods to Accurately Diagnose Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Systematic Review,” Journal of Attention Disorders, 2023, Vol. 27 (12), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/10870547231177470
[26] Niall McLaren, “Last mention of ADHD for the year,” Niall McLaren on Critical Psychiatry, 21 Nov. 2023
[27] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/01/05/mental-health-watchdog-calls-for-shift-away-from-labeling-and-drugging-children/
[28] https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychiatric-drugs/
[29] Sarah Knapton, “Antidepressants can raise the risk of suicide, biggest ever review finds,” The Telegraph, 27 Jan 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/12126146/Antidepressants-can-raise-the-risk-of-suicide-biggest-ever-review-finds.html
[30] https://www.cchrint.org/2016/02/11/psych-plan-for-subjective-depression-screening/; Ashley Welch, “Popular antidepressant Paxil not safe or effective for teens, study finds,” CBS News, 16 Sep 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/paxil-antidepressant-ineffective-unsafe-for-teens-study-finds/
[31] https://www.cchrint.org/2014/10/16/adhd-awareness-month-a-pharmaceutical-marketing-campaign-to-get-more-kids-on-drugs/
[32] Kelly Patricia O’Meara, Still Psyched Out: And Nobody is Getting Better, (Vindicta Publishing, Las Vegas, Chicago, 2025), p. 62, https://www.amazon.com/Still-Psyched-Out-Nobody-Getting/dp/159211539X
[33] Ibid, Kelly Patricia O’Meara, Still Psyched Out: And Nobody is Getting Better, p. 171
[34] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/04/18/parents-rights-form-provides-opt-out-for-school-mental-health-screening/; Vera Sharav, Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), 11 Aug. 2004, http://ahrp.org/two-thirds-foster-care-children-in-mass-on-psych-drugs_globe-psychiatry-soviet-experience-american-fallacy/
[35] http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2016/february/07/mandatory-depression-screening-is-a-depressing-thought/
[36] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/despite-their-promise-school-mental-health-screenings-face-resistance/2023/05
[37] https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb23-1003
[38] https://www.wafb.com/2025/07/28/new-louisiana-laws-take-effect-aug-1-heres-whats-changing/; https://legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1428757
SHARE YOUR STORY/COMMENT