Keep asking if a kid is depressed, he'll probably eventually say yes (09-05-2025--Hour2)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Have you ever heard of Abigail Schreier. She is the author of many books. She has been one of the leaders in the pushback to the transgender insanity stuff that started, you know, probably about a decade ago. And I'll pull up the original book that she wrote and I covered it at the time. I forget the name of it. But she's got another book out now. It's called Bad Therapy, published last year, Actually Bad Therapy. She also runs a sub stack publication and it's called The Truth Fairy, and she publishes some of her work over at the Free Press. And she had a piece the other day headlined stop asking kids if they're depressed. This has to do with these screening questionnaires, and she had like she took her kid into the doctor's office for what was she saying? To middle school age son returned home from sleep away camp with a persistent stomach ache, so she took him to urgent care and they have the kid go to a different room where they asked the kid a series of questions. She did not she was not allowed in the room to hear the questions, but that got her thinking, like, well, what's going on here? And she went and found what those questions are. And if you've been to the doctor's office recently, you have probably been subjected to some form of this questionnaire five questions In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead? In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself? Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how and when are you thinking of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe. So those are the five screening questions. Now. Illinois Governor JB. Pritzker, who as Ben Shapiro always notes, had to be lowered into the event space with a crank, he signed into law mandatory annual mental health screenings for all public school children from third grade through twelfth grade. Mandatory once a year screenings of the like the questionnaire I just gave you, he said. Illinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools. Our schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help, they are empowered to do it, so, she points out here, You know, empowered to ask for help is quite something different than being forced to answer a questionnaire. Right, if basic literacy hadn't already collapsed in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to JB. Pritzker's sales pitch. That's they don't know how to read so anyway. In fact, far too many American children in adolescents without debilitating mental disorders have already been funneled into the slippery mental health pipeline. Her book Bad Therapy investigated the surge in adolescent mental health diagnoses and psychiatric prescription drug use, and she says here many young people without serious mental illness nonetheless spend years languishing with a diagnosis, alternately cursing it and embracing it, believing they have a broken brain, convincing themselves that their struggles are insurmountable. Because of the disorder's constraints, they meet regularly with a therapist or a school counselor, on whom they become increasingly reliant. They lose a sense of efficacy, unable to navigate on their own even minor setbacks and interpersonal conflicts, They begin courses of antidepressants that carry all kinds of side effects like suppressed libido, fatigue, the muffling of all emotion, and even an increase in depression. Anti anxiety drugs and the stimulants given to kids diagnosed with ADHD are both addictive as well as ubiquitously abused. So here's the problem. Kids are, well, let's call it highly suggestible, right. Impressionable is another word for it. They're impressionable, malleable, stupid, No, I'm kidding. I'm just kidding that the last one. But you are. That's why, Like you can put your hands up over your face and the baby believes that you've disappeared. Oh my gosh, where are they? That's why you can. That's why you can play tricks on you know, your five year old or six year old and they don't understand where did the quarter go? How did it fall out of my ear? Oh? My goodness? Right? So what happens then when you start putting these suggestions in front of kids, asking them every year, are you depressed? Now? Were you depressed within the last week? Have you ever wanted to kill yourself? You've ever been sad? Like? You start putting these ideas into their heads every year, and at some point they may say, maybe I am, maybe that's my problem. When it's not just like puberty, you know, and she said, this is especially the case when psychiatric symptoms are concerned. If you ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed about now? About now? How about now? Are you sure about now? Are you sure? Well, you just might decide that he is. If you introduce, oh, let's just say, at random gender dysphoria, you introduce that into a peer grip, and all of a sudden, a swath of seven grade girls are likely to decide they were born in the wrong body. And by the way, she wrote about this in that first book, rapid onset gender dysphoria, where you've got like a friend group, a clique of like these, you know, teenage girls, maybe like half a dozen of them and all of a sudden within a month or two, four out of the six or all trans Do you know what the likelihood of that is. I mean, just from a statistical probability standpoint, it is impossible. That is a social contagion, and young girls are particularly prone to engaging in a social contagion, going all the way back to the Salem witch trials here right, I remember we talked with Bill O'Reilly about this very thing, social contagion. How it spreads because it gives them, gives them power, right, it gives them some sense of identity and belonging. And by the way, we're gonna have Bill O'Reilly back on the program. He's got another book. The guy never stops writing books. We're gonna have him back on the show, like on the fifteenth. I believe. She says a swath of seven grade girls are likely to decide they're born in the wrong body. If you introduce testing anxiety that's another one, or social phobia or suicidality, and many teams teens are likely to decide. Well, I got that too. There's a reason that clinicians keep anorexia patients from socializing unsupervised in a hospital ward why anorexia is a profoundly socially contagious So this is not new. I've been equating gender dysphoria to anorexia and the way that we treat one versus the other. We don't say lebrate anorexia because we know it's socially contagious. We know that when one girl does it, other girls then start doing it too. So no, we don't celebrate, We don't affirm that kind of delusion. You are not obese. In fact, you are about to starve yourself to death. That's the reality of the situation. You're going to starve yourself to death. You are not obese. So when I was a kid, my grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and my dad took care of him as he got worse. Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much support for caregivers and family. But things are different today because of the work of so many people, including the Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me. I participate in the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year and it's called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and you can join the team and walk with us. It's on October eighteenth, that truest field. Sign up at alz dot org slash Walk and then you can search for my team name Pete's Peck. There's also a link at thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia Walk on October eleventh then, so you can make a team and join that one too, or make a donation and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars. If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can go to alz dot org slash walk for all the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's. Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me? For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments. This is why we walk. Doctor Allen, Doctor Alan Francis is a Duke University professor of psychiatry and the author of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is the DSM for the DISH, widely known as the psychiatric Bible. And what doctor Francis told Abigail Schreier about these screenings, these mandatory school screenings for kids that's now the rule in Illinois, says, it's one of these things that's great in theory but terrible in practice. Most kids who screen positive will have transient problems. In other words, they're just feeling depressed today, they're feeling sad today, maybe a couple days. This is not due to a mental disorder. And when then you mislabel the kid, you create a stigmatization and it subjects them to unnecessary treatments. And then on the other side, you are misdirecting scarce resources away from the kidkids who actually need those resources. A certain amount of anxiety and low mood is not only a normal part of life. They are almost a signal feature of adolescence. Except in my case, I was a perfect teenager, as my parents will probably no problems at all with me, none handling a mental diagnosis or sorry. Handing a mental diagnosis to a child or teen can change the way they see themselves. It could create limitations for what he believes he can achieve. It can encourage treatment, dependency on a therapist, and empty out his sense of agency that he has control of his own life. Right, there is solid evidence on the harms produced by receiving a mental diagnosis, harms that are pure tragedy in the case of mis diagnosis. In fact, she says, there's no proof that mental health screeners have ever been shown to improve mental health outcomes. So why are we doing this? Probably the money right, get kids into the pipeline. What mental health surveys reliably do produce is false positives. If you do the statistical calculation, you discover that the false positive rate is about ninety seven percent according to Stephen J. Morse, Professor of Law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Ninety seven percent false positive rate. Schreyer concludes this piece it's very lengthy, by the way, if you want to read it, it is at the Free Press. It's also at her sub stack, which is called the Truth Fairy. She says, the NonStop diagnosis and treatment of American care, it hasn't made a dent in the prevalence of mental illness. In fact, the two have risen in parallel, so more diagnosis and treatment, more prevalence of mental illness. They both are going up. You can't give kids an unhealthy life and expect mental health resources to fix it. That much should now be obvious. The vast majority of our kids and teenagers are not mentally ill, but they are lonely, worried, scared, bummed out. Schools ought to supply them with reliable bolsters to the human spirit, like high expectations, greater independence and responsibility. Far less screen time, far far less screen time. Screen time, not scream time. That's just comes with the territory being a teenager. More recess exercise, art, music, involvement in goal oriented activities that lure them out of their own minds and force them to think about something anything other than themselves, which is a long way of saying what guard against narcissism? Look outward, serve others. Game on Week one starts now, and every touchdown brings you closer to a payout. With Draft Kings sports book and official sports betting partner of the NFL, This isn't just football, it's first touchdown fireworks anytime, TV rushes live bets that ride every momentum shift a DraftKings, every play is your next shot to win. Will the Panthers win? Will we even get a touchdown? New customers bet just five dollars and get three hundred dollars in bonus bets instantly, plus get over two hundred dollars off NFL Sunday ticket from YouTube and YouTube TV. So your season starts now. 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Digital games and commercial use excluded. Restrictions apply additional NFL Sunday Ticket terms or at YouTube dot com slash Go Slash NFL Sunday Tickets, Lash Terms Limited time offer. Abigail Schreyer writing at The Free Press about stop asking kids if they are depressed. The NonStop diagnosis and treatment of American kids has not made a dent in the prevalence of mental illness. Here's a tweet from Melissa to Pete at or sorry at Pete callaner. That's the Twitter handle. It's a Pete tweet. Melissa says, I view the persistent questioning of children whether they're depressed or not end or suicidal to be forcing Stockholm syndrome on the kids. Soon they begin to think maybe I should be depressed or suicidal. Perhaps if the children could read and write, their understanding of their environment would improve. Let's start with the basics. That is a bridge to far Melissa. We shall not teach our children to read, write, or do the math that will make them not depressed now but later in life. Tim, welcome to the program. Hello Tim Pete for taking my call. Advise your listeners that it's not only the persistent questioning of children. Correct. Over a month ago, I had major surgery. Prior to that, I had to undergo physical exam clearing me for the surgery, and I was inundated during that with questions about my mental status and everything in One of them kind of made me sit up and I said, what kind of a questions that? And the guy said, well, you know, we understand that good searchical outcomes happened most often in people who have good emotional status. And after I got passed, I had a series of questionnaires and the questionnaires were basically one of the questions was has your emotional condition gotten better or worse in the last year. So it all seemed to me reading these things they were trying to somehow check a box where they could warrant sending me for some kind of psychological mental screening or something like that to give their psychiatric department a little more money. But it's not just with questions for children, because they may take your son or daughter into a room, but when those questions come to you, you ought to be able to recognize what they're doing. And I just wanted to put that out because I haven't had And afterwards, after the surgery, I had to go to an urgent care and the same thing happened the same here. It's absolutely standard. I've been asked it every time I go for my physical and they always say the same thing. Well, we have to ask these questions their standard and then they usually ask if there's a gun in the house. Yeah yeah, But I just wanted to put that out. It's not just with yeah ah. But the problem is it's the problem is when you start asking kids these questions, gins they because they are impressionable in a way that adults are not generally, you then end up with kids essentially you know you're you're leading them to the diagnosis, and then that becomes a lifetime diagnosis. I think that was the point. I understand. I understand that Tim. I appreciate the call man. Have a great weekend, yes, sir, take care Christy. Actually, my wife came across this story about a week ago and I looked into it and it's related to all of this. Have you ever heard of the Rosenhan experiment? You ever heard of this? It's from nineteen seventy three, so between nine This is from a website called simply psychology dot org. Okay, between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy two, there was a professor, a psychiatrist at Stanford University. His name is David Rosenhan, and he wanted to see if people could get admitted into a psychiatric hospital and get diagnosed incorrectly. Okay, And there was a reason for this. So he sent eight what we call or what he called pseudo patients. Okay, so they're not really patients, eight people who are seen, sent them into twelve different psychiatric hospitals without revealing that to the staff of the hospital. None of the pseudo patients had any symptoms or any history of mental disorders, and in all twelve hospitals, the pseudo patients were diagnosed with a mental disorder and hospitalized every time. In no instance was the misdiagnosis discovered during the hospitalization. Now, in some of the stays, the patient observed significant deficits in patient staff contact. That's an important element here that I don't know if they were expecting. But then so hospitals got mad when they found out and he published these results and they got mad, like well, they presented they said they were hearing voices, and so of course we take them in. Of course we're going to treat them. And what should we turn them away? Why don't you try it again? And so he did. They did a follow up study. They said, we're going to send in more pseudo patients, and you guys need to rank all of the patients that come in on a scale of one to ten, right, one or two being least likely to be the pseudo patient, ten being the most likely to be the pseudo patient. If you if you thought somebody came in that was the patient, then you'd give them a ten or whatever, and let's see the results on for that part. Staff was aware of the previous study. Forty one of the one hundred and ninety three patients got a one or two score, just forty one, so twenty one percent got a one or two. So they were it's like three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, Like they were giving scores out to like everybody that came in the door. Do you know how many people were actually sent in as pseudo patients? Zero? He didn't send a single one in. But now the hospital's like, oh, these are plants, these are undercover patients. These are the pseudo patients. So they're like, oh, yeah, that guy is crazy. Oh it is, he's not really crazy. We're going to give him this high score. We think this is the fake. Not a single one was. The findings provided evidence that the accuracy and validity of the psychiatric diagnoses or in question. All Right, you hear me talk a lot about incentives, right, Well, let's talk about incentive trips, the kind that companies offer employees to fire them up and reward their teams. If you own a business or you work somewhere that offers these incentive trips, first off, good for you. But also there is a custom app that's a game changer for these trips. It's called Incentive Tripkit. Private group messaging, shared photos, you're itinerary, travel details all built into a single, easy to use app. There's even a traveler locator, so Carl from accounting doesn't get left behind. The best part about incentive trip Kit it's totally private, no email captures, no sign ups, no cringe ads. It's simple, clean and secure, and when the trip is over, incentive trip Kit turns those highlights into a professional storytelling video. So think about it. When you launch next year's incentive trip campaign, that video becomes your greatest motivator. Talk about a return on investment, right, you got to check out incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive trip kit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns. So it seemed that once people got diagnosed with an aberrant psychiatric trait in this Rosenhan study or experiment, which let's be clear, like there's some ethical questions about how this one was conducted, right, sending people in pretending to be suffering from you know, hearing voices or whatever, and then once they're in there, they're like not all cleared up. But here's the thing. Once they got in they had this diagnosis, they were unable to escape the diagnosis despite having dropped the farce immediately upon their admission. But once they got the label, that's how the doctors and staff saw them, and anything that they did then became a symptom of the disorder. The admission diagnosis seemed, according to Rosenhan quote, so powerful that many of the participants' normal behaviors were overlooked entirely or profoundly misinterpreted. Right. Things that were considered aberrant behavior like pacing around or writing frequently, right, that would have just been boredom had they been had they not been diagnosed right. Participants also were not paid any attention by psychiatrists, nurses, or attendants. At four of the hospitals. Those that were paid some attention, the average was about six point eight minutes a day. So stamps overwhelming avoidance of the patients resulted in an overwhelming sense of powerlessness which invades the individual as he is continually exposed to the depersonalization of the psychiatric hospital. Right. And so this then makes you wonder, like behave are the patients in these facilities behaving in a way that is induced by the setting itself because they're being starved of personal interaction, because they would try to go up and talk to the staff or the doctors whatever, just they were directed the by Rosenhuant to try to interact with the staff and just talk to them like you would talk to anybody at your place of work, anybody in your daily life. And they could not get people to engage with them like that. All right, let me go to some of the messages here on the email. This is from Tim who says, routine mental health questions. I recently went to have my teeth cleaned, and even they asked those questions. When did this start? And who is behind these questions? I guess it's like the AMA or somebody. Yeah, but I remember this started several years ago. Now I want to say, maybe under Obamacare. I'm going to go to the text line. Another huge bentness from Chris. Another huge benefit of shepherding additional folks into the mental illness pipeline is their potential adult loss of firearms rights, which is an important pillar in the overall goal of limiting and eliminating private firearm ownership. It is nearly impossible to criticize because everybody agrees that actually mentally ill folks should not be armed in society. Bain draws the parallel here to that old in school DARE drug awareness program. Studies showed poor results and in some cases actually increased drug use. Researcher said the possibility that the program actually peaked curiosity. John says mental health questions are are now out of hand, even for adults. If I had a razor in hand and was ready to end it all, I'd still answer I'm happy and never felt better. Another person saying, if they label you, then they can take your guns. Bill and Florida says, my podcast is still not updating. When I go to WBT dot com, I cannot see hours two and three from yesterday. So I would recommend you get your podcasts from the peatpod dot com and subscribe there. You can go to that website. The podcasts are loaded up all the time right there the peatpod dot com. You can pick any podcasting platform. The RSS code is the same. You can listen to it right there on the screen on the website itself, but the peatpod dot com, and then you can pick any of these different platforms where the RSS codes may be available. Because like sometimes the iTunes, one doesn't load for some reason has to do with their back end updating processes and stuff. So try that or try to update the app's I always whenever I run into a problem with an app on my phone, the first thing I do is I go to the apps details, the information you know about the app itself. And if you have an Android, you just on your home screen. You just hold your press and hold down the icon for the app. You just hold it and it'll pop up a little menu and there's a little thing at the top there like information, little eye in a circle, and you tap that, bad boy, scroll to the bottom app details, click on that, and then it's like update now and boom hit update. So sometimes it's just an update issue. Hope, I hope I walked it through that well enough. Thank you for bringing up this topic. At every single wellness check for my kids, there goes through or tries to go through the mental health check. I have to immediately stop them the second I hear do you sometimes find yourself sad. Not only is it ridiculous, but it's also a money grab for doctors. Our insurance does not cover these, so we were winding up with charges for an otherwise covered wellness check before we started opting out. That's interesting. Yeah, well, I mean that is probably part of it too. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalnarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.