Sheila Matthews, co-founder of the national non-profit parent organization AbleChild, said the mental health industry needs to be “booted” out of out of the educational system, explaining how the pharmaceutical industry has infiltrated schools across the nation and is actively working, on taxpayer funds, to “market” mental health and treatments for diagnoses to children.
Matthews cited the 2022 passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which allocated billions of dollars to hire and train “mental health professionals” and “ identify and support students who need mental health care and help them access that care” in U.S. schools.
In regards to the billions of dollars being allocated to U.S. schools to promote the pharmaceutical industry under the guise of mental health advocacy, Matthews warned that children are a “captive audience,” which means that the industry’s marketing has the possibility to be “endless.”
“We have mental health clinics in the school systems, which opens up a whole new marketing campaign for [the industry]. Children are a captive audience, so with these diagnoses, we’re going to see more and more increase of the diagnosing and the drugging of children,” Matthews said on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Noting how the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was passed in the “dead of the night,” Matthews said federal lawmakers need to repeal the measures in the legislation pushing mental health awareness and treatments in schools.
Moving forward, Matthews also said lawmakers should hold public hearings to “understand that their partnership with the mental health and the pharmaceutical industry is actually hurting humanity.”
“We can’t continue to throw boatloads of money at this. We have to get back to our organizations… We have to go back to not diagnosing these children as medical issues, but as educational issues. We have to start doing IQ tests. These are very smart people that are falling prey to these psychiatric labels. We really need to boot the mental health industry out of the educational system,” Matthews said.
“We just need some brave lawmakers,” Matthews added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
