Category Archives: Psychology

School Closures Resulted In Spike In Suicide Attempts Among Kids

by Kerry Dougherty

How is it that those of us without fancy degrees from prestigious universities or medical training intuitively KNEW that the Covid-19 lockdowns and school closures would have a profoundly negative effect upon kids?

I watched one of my nieces, who graduated from high school in 2021, spend her junior year at home, isolated from her friends and extended family. A future physician and excellent student, she sat alone, doing class work off of a computer screen. On top of that, her entire social structure was dismantled. There were no sleepovers or parties, no sports, dances or proms. When schools finally reopened she was seated more than 6 feet away from the nearest other student at lunch and if they dared speak to each other, a teacher would scream, “NO talking!”

All for a virus that barely affected kids, as we all knew from the earliest weeks of the pandemic.

I worried about her and her friends. Turns out, she’s OK. Some of her classmates? Not so much.

Last week, UVA Today published a study showing a sharp increase in the number of attempted suicides by children ages 10 to 19 from 2020 on.

The rate of suspected suicide attempts by poisoning among children and adolescents ages 10 to 19 reported to U.S. poison centers increased 30% during 2021 – the COVID-19 pandemic’s first full year – compared with 2019, a new UVA Health study found.

Attempted suicides continue to climb.
Continue reading

Public School Climate Lessons Terrorize Virginia’s Children

Courtesy of the BBC

by James C. Sherlock

A headline from the home page of Save the Children:

Climate Change Is a Grave Threat to Children’s Survival.” 

Climate change is thus not a “challenge.” Not a threat to children’s happiness. But rather a threat to their “survival.”

That is what children are being taught in many Virginia public school classrooms. Kids, being sponges, have learned that lesson, and are understandably severely depressed about it.

Parents and the Board of Education, take note. That cannot be allowed to continue.

For years, studies have shown the existence of psychological distress about climate change that has dimensions within feelings, emotions, cognition and behavior. That stress has been demonstrated to disproportionately affect young people.

The largest and most international study of climate anxiety in young people was peer-reviewed and posted in The Lancet in December 2021.

Regardless of one’s personal feelings about climate change, no caring adult would want, as revealed in that study, children feeling “very or extremely worried” (46% of children in the United States) or, worse, negatively affected in their ability to function (26% of children in the United States).

None would want near half or more than half of children reporting feeling “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty” and “betrayed” about anything, much less a phenomenon that is measurable as a current event with which we are dealing but arguably is overstated by progressives as a future prospect.

Climate change can, and should, be taught to children. But it must be done without terrorizing them. That cannot be too much to ask.

Scaring children to turn them into political activists is child abuse per se.

It must stop. Continue reading

What Do We Owe To and Expect from a Special Ed Teacher?

Abigail Zwerner
Courtesy AP

by James C. Sherlock

On February 16, USA Today published a story by Jeanine Santucci. That is the latest in an excellent series of reports on the shooting of Newport News first grade teacher Abigail Zwerner.

Her article, “Virginia 6-year-old who shot his teacher exposes flaws in how schools treat students with disabilities.” raises questions that Virginians need to answer.

  • What, exactly, do we expect of special education teachers and what do we owe them?
  • What training and resources must we provide?
  • How do we keep them safe?
  • How do we get enough people to accept the challenges and risks?

Any school official or teacher will tell you:

  • That the best-organized parents in K-12 education are special-ed parents;
  • That federal law is very prescriptive and provides little room for error on the part of the schools;
  • That schools’ (meaning taxpayers’) liability for error is open-ended; and
  • That special-ed continues to get more challenging, especially after COVID accelerated the number of emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.

Few school divisions will claim to have any of that under control.

 JLARC in 2020 concurred with that assessment in Virginia.

Longstanding shortage of special education teachers persists, and many school divisions rely on under-prepared teachers to fill gaps.

IEPs are not consistently designed effectively.

School divisions are not consistently preparing students with disabilities for life after high school.

Continue reading

Bias and Risk in Behavioral Polls and Studies – A Cautionary Tale for Public Policy

Courtesy WebIndia

by James C. Sherlock

Here at BR, both the authors and commenters spend a great deal of time discussing the outcomes of behavioral polls and studies.

Taxes, mandates, and bans are behaviorally informed. As are most public policies.

But behavioral science adds levels of risk and bias much more prevalent than in the hard sciences.

As a citizenry, we generally understand that polls that predict future behavior can prove unreliable because we see political polling.

Most expect polls about how we feel about our lives to be imperfect, but not purposely so. Yet some polls are designed to support a specific political position.

We probably understand a lot less about the risks and biases in behavioral studies that govern most public policy, because assessing them requires technical expertise most, including most elected politicians and political observers do not possess.

Which is a key reason such policies often go wrong. Continue reading

Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Virginia Public Schools – Dangerous Children’s Services Act Changes Proposed

Credit JAMA Pediatrics, April 6, 2020

by James C. Sherlock

One of the key elements of state and local efforts to support children with behavioral health, educational disabilities, and other challenges is the Children’s Services Act (CSA) (the Act).

In education, its primary role has been paying for placement of children and youth with educational disabilities into private special education schools (PSES).

CSA funds support those students whose educations are judged by the public schools themselves to be too demanding for them to accommodate.

The local CSA Community Policy and Management Teams, appointed by the governing body of the participating local political subdivision, send their own children to those private schools.

I will describe Virginia’s network of PSESs in a follow-on article.

Changes proposed. In a 2020 report, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) had found a long list of seemingly disqualifying flaws in public school special education that would prevent them from accepting students with more severe disabilities than the ones they already try to serve.

Yet there is a movement to remove some severely troubled kids from PSESs back into public schools that have already admitted that they cannot properly serve them.

JLARC, in a disturbingly superficial report in that same year, recommended CSA money be taken away from PSESs and made available to public schools, which is not currently permitted under law.

And that all of the then-fungible CSA school money be administered by the Department of Education, not the Department of Health and Human Resources.

This recommendation was made in the face of the fact that JLARC, in both 2020 reports, admitted the public schools are not equipped to handle these children, much less for the average of 271 days a year they attend PSESs.

So some combination of progressive ed-school dogma, as yet undefined fairy dust and widely non-existent qualified mental health providers and trained special ed teachers are apparently to be sprinkled on the public schools to transform them to be ready to accept children whom they have already referred out to PSESs.

Most of the proposed changes are dangerous, dogmatic and thinly researched nonsense. Continue reading

Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Virginia Public Schools – Big Complications and Major Changes

Credit JAMA Pediatrics, April 6, 2020

by James C. Sherlock

Rebecca Aman, a member of the Newport News School Board, is frustrated. She told me in an interview that:

Without sufficient discipline and access to clinical mental health services, behavioral intervention does not work to make schools safer and healthier.

She believes that Newport News schools need to improve both discipline and the effectiveness of behavioral interventions.

She is absolutely right.

But school-based mental health services offer different, very complex and rapidly changing challenges.

The profession of psychology has recognized that the one-on-one clinical treatment model is permanently out of reach for the broad communities needing assistance because the supply of qualified professionals cannot now and will never meet the demand.

So the delivery model is in the midst of profound change.

Three key changes being pursued are

  • a far bigger emphasis on prevention, much of it to be delivered by school staff;
  • better diagnosis; and
  • “school based” (their term) group treatments.

Which raises at least three questions:

  • Are the pediatric mental health delivery models changing so much that the schools are “shooting behind the rabbit” in the hunt for more services?
  • What does the profession of psychology mean when it describes massively expanded “school-based” services? The schools and parents better find out.
  • Should schools even be in the hunt for more in-school services? I say no. They are already trying to do too much.

Continue reading

Virginia Community Schools Redefined – Part 2 – Stop Trying to Provide Mental Health Services in School

by James C. Sherlock

In Part 1 of this series I described the current Virginia Community School Framework (the Framework) and found it not only lacking, but counter-productive.

Its basic flaw is that it assumes all services to school children will be provided in the schools by school employees, including mental health services.

When you start there, you get nowhere very expensively, less competently, and with considerably more danger in the case of mental health than if the schools were to partner with other government and non-profit services.

This part of the series will deal with child and adolescent mental health services exclusively.

Public mental health, intellectual disability and substance abuse services for children and adolescents are funded by governments at every level. For the federal view of the system of care, see here.

In Virginia, those services are organized, overseen and funded through a state and local agency system.

  • The state agency is the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) in the Secretariat of Health and Human Resources. The Department of Medical Assistance Services (DMAS) (Medicaid) plays a funding and patient management role as well;
  • Local agencies funded and overseen by DBHDS are the Community Services Boards (CSB’s) throughout the state.

Some schools and school systems seem to operate on a different planet from their local CSB’s. Indeed, the Framework mentions them only reluctantly and in passing.

The ed school establishment clearly wants to handle child and adolescent mental health problems in-house, with tragic results. They need to stop it now.

There is absolutely no need to wait. Continue reading

Virginia Community Schools Redefined – Hubs for Government and Not-for-Profit Services in Inner Cities – Part 1 – the Current Framework

by James C. Sherlock

I believe a major approach to address both education and health care in Virginia’s inner cities is available if we will define it right and use it right.

Community schools.

One issue. Virginia’s official version of community schools, the Virginia Community School Framework, (the Framework) is fatally flawed.

The approach successful elsewhere brings government professional healthcare and social services and not-for-profit healthcare assets simultaneously to the schools and to the surrounding communities at a location centered around existing schools.

That model is a government and private not-for-profit services hub centered around schools in communities that need a lot of both. Lots of other goals fall into place and efficiencies are realized for both the community and the service providers if that is the approach.

That is not what Virginia has done in its 2019 Framework.

The rest of government and the not-for-profit sector are ignored and Virginia public schools are designed there to be increasingly responsible for things that they are not competent to do.

To see why, we only need to review the lists of persons who made up both the Advisory Committee and the Additional Contributors. Full of Ed.Ds and Ph.D’s in education, there was not a single person on either list with a job or career outside the field of education. Continue reading

Democrats Want to Raise Youngkin-Proposed Mental Health Budget Increase

Health Resources and Services Administration Mental Health Care Health Professional Shortage Areas, by State, as of September 30, 2022, data.HRSA.go.                 Courtesy Governor Youngkin

by James C. Sherlock

There is fundamental agreement in Richmond over mental health services.

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Virginia’s forecasts of long-term budget surpluses mean this year’s General Assembly has a chance to catch up with years of under-funding Virginia schools and the state’s behavioral health system, General Assembly Democrats say.

To govern is to choose. “Democrats” may wish they had used different words than “years of underfunding,” considering who had control in Richmond in 2020 and 2021.

But it is actually helpful that they now think even the governor’s proposal for a 20% increase in the mental health budget approved last year is not enough. If (a big if) more money can be spent efficiently and effectively.

The governor has proposed a $230 million increase in behavioral health program spending over what was approved last year.

So, as the old saying goes, they are just discussing price.

Let’s look at the behavioral health situation to see why. Continue reading

Preparing for the Costs to Government of Virginia’s Generation COVID

John Littel, Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources

by James C. Sherlock

To justify her insistence on keeping schools closed, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in February of 2021, “kids are resilient and kids will recover.”

She brought that same message to Virginia.

In one of the strangest choices in Virginia political history, Terry McAuliffe brought Weingarten to Virginia to campaign with him on the last weekend of his losing gubernatorial campaign.

Thus sealing his defeat.

It turns out, as it was always going to, that you can’t keep kids out of school for up to a year and a quarter, homebound, and expect all of them to “recover.”

I will call here those in K-12 during COVID school shutdowns Generation COVID (Gen C).

I wrote the other day of an estimate by a renowned educational economist that the 1.2 million Gen C kids in Virginia public schools would lose several hundred billion dollars in lifetime earnings because of un-repaired damages to their learning of all types.

His critics here argued into the night about study methodology, but none denied costs at some level would be there. They did not offer their own estimates.

John Littel, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, has the job of preparing his agencies for the lifetime social costs of those children. Continue reading

Slick Selling of Child Gender Transitions at UVa Children’s Hospital

by James C. Sherlock

The University of Virginia Children’s Hospital offers a Madison Avenue-quality sales pitch for child gender transition.

As written and smoothly delivered, it deflects any reservation parents may have in supporting such transitions by telling them they have been misled or are being selfish or both.

It helps parents decide by blaming their reservations on myths.

I offer below both a video and a transcript of that sales presentation.

The presenter uses a variation on the closing technique called the “question close.” In this one she both asks the questions — identified as myths — and answers them. The presentation carefully avoids mention of the word sterilization.

I expect that, given the sensitivity of the subject, it is very likely the best technique for closing the sale. Brilliant even.

If that is your goal.

The reputation of UVa hospital likely will be damaged by this exposure of how it sells this particular product. They have earned it. Continue reading

Hormone Treatment of Transgender Adolescents in Virginia – New Concerns

by James C. Sherlock

We have discussed at length the controversial policies of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

It is time to consider the impact of Great Britain’s ongoing National Health Service Review of its transgender support to children and young people.

It offers new concerns about clinical challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria in adolescent patients, especially the safety of puberty blockers.

And it causes us to discuss what has been going on for years at the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital Transgender Youth Health Services.  

It is a state hospital that has treated hundreds of patients from the earliest stages of puberty with both puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones. Continue reading

The “Occasional” Butchery of Children

By James C. Sherlock

Chloe Cole after childhood surgical transition to a boy (left) and de-transition to a girl (right) – Courtesy of Chloe Cole and the New York Post

The New York Post wrote recently:

At 12 years old, Chloe Cole decided she was transgender. At 13, she was put on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone. At 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. Less than a year later, she realized she’d made a mistake.

Note the gracious acceptance of agency by this young woman, even though she made a “decision” at 12 that she was transgender.  Some clearly think that a child of twelve is mature enough to make such a decision.

We see no such agency proclaimed by her parents, pediatrician, endocrinologist or psychologist.  I am sure they were “supporting” that child.

No agency is apparently accepted by the state in which she lived.  The state in which her doctors were licensed.

Let’s examine the agency of the adult players in such matters in Virginia.

Continue reading

The National Association of School Psychologists is Going to Get Its Members Fired

George Will

by James C. Sherlock

I had dinner with George Will once years ago aboard ship. He is very smart, uncannily observant, understatedly amusing and a terrific dinner guest.

He published yesterday in The Washington Post a column, “Witness how progressives in government forfeit the public’s trust.”

The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) has proven that Mr. Will’s observation of progressive behavior has escaped the confines of government and infected nonprofits.

As proof of its commitment to progressive dogma, NASP has published a position statement, Promoting Just Special Education Identification and School Discipline Practices. The redefinitions of roles for and recommended assumptions of authority by school psychologists recommended in that paper are absolutely breathtaking. It unintentionally but very effectively challenges the trust of parents, teachers and principals in the very professionals it represents.

NASP wants them to devalue objectivity, the results of tests that only they are qualified to perform, and assume the roles of school sociologists, principals and assistant principals. Roles the NASP defines, of course, with — wait for it — progressive dogma.

Let’s assume they do that. Two related questions:

  • Who in the schools or among the parents will ever again trust school psychologist evaluations? The NASP has now set them up to be sued. Successfully.
  • What school principal will have them?

Continue reading