Picture this scenario: Little Katie comes home with a piece of paper from school. According to the note, on last month's mandatory mental health evaluations, Katie was found to be bipolar, and she is to see a psychiatrist immediately. The note contains the name and numbers of several school appointed psychiatrists.
You snicker. Katie's been moping around the house, sure, but there's nothing about her that's atypical for that age. You ignore the letter and put it in the round file, thinking nothing more of it.
A month later, someone shows up at your house in professional business clothes. The individual identifies themself as a social worker from CPS, and announces that you are under investigation for medical neglect. You tell them that you didn't see anything particularly wrong with your children, and the social worker excuses herself for a second. She returns, and shortly after, there is a knock on the door. This time, it's the police. They announce that your children are being taken from the home because young Katie is in imminent danger from an untreated psychiatric disorder.
Think this kind of scenario is set in some third world regime or in an apocalyptic novel? Think again. These events could be playing themselves out in American homes within the next three to five years, if the government has its way. And, in the interest of fairness, it must be noted that it is NOT just the Democrats who are pulling these strings, but the Republicans have their hands in it every bit as much. Indeed, part of the proposals for No Child Left Behind are mental health screening for every American schoolchild.
The brochure I received yesterday from the Texas Health Institute addresses the Institute's concerns that mental health issues are not being met. It offers numbers to support its claims that many people in the state of Texas "need" help and are not receiving it in such a way as to make the organization's argument clear: that somehow there is a need not only to get help to these people, but to identify them, with or without their cooperation.
In my past assessments on mental health issues, I will admit to being a little glib. There are certainly people out there who can benefit greatly from mental health treatment. But the truth is, if you leave it up to a psychiatrist/psychologist to determine whether or not you need mental health treatment, they will amost always determine that you do. After all, it is not in their best interests to lose a potential patient.
The truth is, what is on the verge of happening in America's schools is the inevitable end result of allowing the government to grow too big; to take its authority into every facet of our lives. We are so infatuated with the idea of absolute security that we envision a world without crime, poverty, or hunger, and we're willing to take Orwellian leaps to get there, giving the government control of virtually everything. But that is not the path of the free man, it is the path of the slave, and it is antithetical to everything we ought to believe as Americans.
Unless we wake up and begin dismantling the monster we've created, big government will continue to grow until there is nothing left of the freedoms the founding fathers envisioned. And it won't come squarely from the left; the attack will hit just as hard from the right.