📢PSA- The CDC endorses universal psychotherapy in the classroom - but is your school counselor licensed to apply it?
When not combating extinction event-level threats, the CDC is giving its stamp of approval to put your kids in therapy - here's what to ask when the school calls
Remember how the survivors in The Walking Dead series first sought refuge in an underground CDC bunker to ride out the zombie apocalypse? You’d think the *scientists* at the Center for Disease Control - 1,700 of them across 200 laboratories - were too busy cloistered in BSL-4 labs when not trekking off to remote locations to contain mutant pathogens before they slip into the gene pool. You’d think they have enough to worry about, what with all these microbial predators locked in a Darwinian struggle with humans to dominate the planet. After all, according to their website, the CDC’s mission is, “To protect the lives and health of the American public 24/7.”
With all that on their plate, how do they have time (or funding) to issue comprehensive mental health therapy prescriptions for your local school districts? But here we are.
And here they come in their white lab coats, hazmat suits and clipboards to assist schools “at the forefront of action to combat the mental health” disorders preying on our nation’s children.
And what do these experts in public health recommend when not monitoring threats of mass destruction to humanity?
Put the kids in therapy. While in school.
The CDC’s 2023 “Action Guide for School and District Leaders” contains six strategies for schools that amounts to a full endorsement of school-based mental health programs: promote social emotional learning theory, increase “mental health literacy,” enhance “connectedness,”…and provide cognitive behavioral therapy.
The Action Guide does not promote personal hygiene, exercise, healthy eating and lifestyles - things you might ordinarily be concerned about or hope they learn in school. Real, tried-and-true success factors to a healthy physical life.
The CDC is apparently more worried about things you can’t detect with a microscope, conditions associated with the mind:
anxiety
depressive symptoms
negative coping behaviors
internalizing behaviors
And to do so with a “focus on equity” too, of course. Because reasons.
Naturally, school administrators and educators everywhere will download the Action Guide straight into their neural pathways, like an automatic software update, and just like that, new programming unfolds with brightly colored “facts and figures” brochures stamped C-D-C. So it must be true.
CDC-recommended strategy #5 in the Action Guide is cognitive behavioral therapy either alone or in combination with mindfulness and acceptance therapy. CBT is one of the most popular forms of the over 250 different variations of psychotherapy to treat dysfunctional emotional reactions and patterns of maladaptive behavior.
Of course, they don’t call it psychotherapy.
Schools avoid overtly using the proper terminology of behavioral health science. Instead they call it an “intervention” - a less-than-descriptive substitute for “psychotherapy” which, if you’re not a professionally licensed school counselor, is a felony in some states, including AZ. So, use the word “intervention” in an authoritative voice, repeat it often and everywhere - and no one will know whether you’re talking about academic tutoring or some kind of New Age-y crystal healing circle.
Scroll back up and look again at the Description of Approach section. The CDC is recommending dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), a variation of cognitive behavioral therapy increasingly pushed to support universal school-based mental health programs based on social emotional learning theories. DBT was developed to treat emotional dysregulation, promote acceptance of oneself and others, and to change behavior by learning skills such as mindfulness, problem-solving, cognitive reappraisal, and distraction techniques. Sounds innocuous, right? It’s just teaching skills to be better versions of themselves. Teachers teach skills in schools, so they can just teach these skills, too.
The CDC says this therapy can be used to treat coping, depression and somatic symptoms (a disorder where a patient excessively focuses on physical pain or weakness as a physical manifestation of underlying mental stress, depression or anxiety).
But the science is not settled around DBT. A 2023 Australian study shows that DBT actually results in children reporting “significantly poorer quality parent-child relationships” and is thus not recommended for universal use with adolescents. As in, DBT is actually dangerous to the health of your parent-child relationship. As in, DBT is actually a threat to healthy, functioning familial relationships.
But it’s CDC-approved for use in schools. With American kids. Your kids.
Now consider: To treat mental health conditions such as these, school personnel must be acting on a formal diagnosis, right? It’s not like school staff are just guessing your child has a disorder, right? Some professional has met with the child, assessed her through observation, administered mental health screening tests of some sort, and then, using their professional judgment, education and experience, concluded she would benefit from psychotherapy?
That’s what mental health professionals do. Like doctors, but for the mind, and instead of pharmacological therapy, or physical therapy, mental health professionals prescribe and apply psychological therapy, or, psychotherapy for short.
But teachers are not mental health professionals. Teachers are not therapists. Neither are school counselors. If they are subjecting the child to these therapies, they are literally…just guessing.
So, here we go. Eight questions to ask the caller from school when they reach out to recommend your child for an “intervention” - if they even call at all:
Ask them, if not academic in nature, what is the theoretical orientation for the intervention?
Is the school counselor professionally licensed to provide it?
Where can I verify the licensure status?
What are my rights to both receive and withdraw informed consent to engage in this activity?
What’s the difference between “short-term counseling sessions” and “therapy” in ordinary plain language?
If my child is negatively affected by this “intervention” what is legal remedy against the school? Against the counselor?
What are my rights to confidentiality - will the counselor collect data, or disclose personal information about my child to other staff?
What legally enforceable ethical rules , if any, apply to the counselor?
Most likely, the next communication from school will be, “oh, never-mind.”
End.
Excellent work. Delay returning to the plow as long as possible, Noble Cincinnatus!