Schools Share Mental Health Records: HB852

Virginia House Bill #852 would, if enacted, authorize colleges and universities to demand "mental health records" for all schools previously attended. Full text:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB852

Adolescents, by definition, have hormone surges. Adolescent hormone surges can look and feel similar to, but are not actually associated with, lifelong bipolar disorder. Treatment for bipolar disorder is expensive and uncomfortable; side effects may compromise a patient's productivity. So under this bill, if your teenager reports a low mood to a clueless, uncaring school counsellor who happens to have been notified that the school could get more money by reporting more students with permanent disabilities, not only can the counsellor mislabel your teenager as bipolar, but that label can follow your teenager everywhere s/he goes for the rest of his/her life.

The concern here is obviously to prevent violence...but the thinking rests on a misunderstanding of the observed patterns of mental illness. Probably all teenagers have had thoughts like "I wish I'd never been born" and "I'd like to kill that [teacher, student labor supervisor, person I saw flirting with the person I have a crush on]." Probably most teenagers don't bother to discuss these thoughts with the school counsellor. However, even if your teenager did discuss these thoughts with the school counsellor, that is not a valid indicator that s/he is likely to become violent in college.

Use of certain medications, especially Prozac and similar antidepressants, is a valid indicator of a 5-10% chance that a student is likely to become violent in college. And nobody is likely to benefit from a weaselly pharmaceutical lobbyist's efforts to claim that the student who becomes violent, as a side effect of using antidepressants, was expressing violent thoughts in high school--i.e. that the college student was formerly a teenager--and therefore had a lifelong, pre-existing mental illness that should have been medicated sooner. The fact is that people who've never been plagued by violent thoughts become violent, and people who've never been delusional become delusional, after using serotonin-boosting antidepressants. We as a nation need to deal with it.

HB852 may have the beneficial effect of discouraging students from telling school counsellors anything, thus enabling the high schools to save money on guidance counsellors...but it's not as likely to prevent further shootings at Virginia Tech as requiring people who use antidepressants to be in a hospital, or supervised by trained nurses, would be.