The heartbreak of youth suicide and its recent rise in America has spawned a multitude of proposed solutions. But suicide is an extremely sensitive topic that must be approached very carefully with our children.
I have major concerns about how this subject has become another tool for anti-family special interests and vendors who are recklessly exploiting yet another “safety” issue without the best interests of children at heart.
It’s ironic that this subject has come to my attention during Easter season. Why is so much of our messaging to children preoccupied with death in one fashion or another? Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6) and His resurrection to life from the grave is the blessed hope for all believers.
But if we listen to the public school culture, most kids are just struggling to cope and stay alive, and all students need group therapy to manage the free-fall educators consider typical life.
The school counseling profession seems to follow three golden rules: 1) Judeo-Christian beliefs harm children; 2) “lgbtq” and abortion are normal; and 3) parents are often the enemy.
Families must strongly push back against this poison, denying the validity of woke, corruption-enabling beliefs invading our children’s souls. Any teacher or counselor who privately turns children against their faith, their parents or biological reality should be taken out to the school parking lot, put in stocks and marked with a rainbow-colored “M” – for malpractice.
And so here comes the suicide prevention industry, the new brainchild of the anti-education, anti-life, therapeutic school culture.
A new Ohio law requires one hour of suicide prevention instruction for public school students in grades 6 to 12 each year. The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (ODEW) has published a list of recommended curricula schools may use.
But think about how cruel this is. A lot of damage can be done in one hour a year because children are very suggestible. Will dwelling on and warning about the possibility of self-harm destabilize some children? Of course it will. But the group therapy culture insists that traumatizing all children is worth the value of saving even one child. Is that the trade off we must make? Sacrificing children (again) for tenuous “solutions”?
When children are taught that suicide is rising among youth, it is guaranteed to produce internal stress they did not feel prior to such lessons.
Kids personalize messages. “Will that be one of my friends, or me?” many will ponder. And we wonder why child depression and anxiety are rising. Some of these “solutions” may be contributing.
Among the tools of the suicide prevention industry are the crisis hotlines suddenly promoted to kids ad nauseum. Under the Biden administration, a national suicide hotline was established, 9-8-8, which can be accessed by youth as well as adults. Ohio passed a law setting up state support for 988 as well. Ohio now requires all high school and college student ID's to feature the national 988 suicide hotline number with an Ohio logo.
But there are many red flags about 988. One is that the service sub-contracts with other programs including the sexually corrupt Trevor Project, to allow specialized phone counseling about homosexuality and gender confusion. We can confidently assume that the Biden agenda that set this up permitted only one viewpoint—that struggling adolescents should be encouraged to embrace these desires and that moral or faith objections were de facto “bigotry.”
Should taxpayer funds contribute to counseling that never questions “lgbtq” behaviors? And especially to kids who are already struggling and in a possible mental health crisis?
Responsible advisors would initiate a triage of questions after a student’s self-confessed same sex attraction or gender confusion, gently seeking information about possible molestation, physical abuse, porn use, and other life experiences highly correlated with the development of these aberrant feelings. But progressive politics won’t allow the truth to shine a helpful light into the sexual darkness incessantly pushed into the souls of America’s kids. A pro-“lgbtq” bias taints almost all counseling programs deployed in schools as well as the suicide hotline community.
Recently an article in The Daily Caller reported that the Trump administration is taking a hard look at the national 988 hotline component where teens can be referred at their request to phone counselors who specialize in "lgbtq" issues.
This was confirmed when I contacted the Ohio 9-8-8 service. Here’s what they told me: “The 988 network is currently administered by a national vendor, Vibrant Emotional Health, selected by SAMHSA. As such, they have established three initial selections a caller can make: 1 for Veterans; 2 for Spanish; and 3 for LGBTQ youth. If no selection is made, the call is routed to the nearest 988 call center based on the caller's geographical location.”
So the 9-8-8 number will send troubled kids into this phone tree featuring diabolical “lgbtq” victimhood/ propaganda. And the calls are anonymous, so the adults giving this bad advice aren’t held accountable.
One of the sub-contractors, Trevor Project, is a predatory organization. Numerous reports about Trevor indicate counselors encourage students to embrace “lgbtq” feelings and even connect teens to sexually corrupting support chat groups,“Trevor Space,” run by unknown adults. Many school districts still list the Trevor Project as a suicide counseling resource. If you see that name on a school website, notify the school that this organization is not a help but a possible threat to children.
School suicide prevention instruction is a mine field of stupid ideas, many connected to an SEL (social emotional learning) framework, which is in itself a black hole of time-wasting, reckless group therapy and DEI indoctrination. Peer-to-peer counseling/reporting is one of these foolish suicide prevention ideas. Three programs offering this, endorsed by the Ohio DEW, are Sources of Strength, Hope Squad and Mental Health First Aid.
I’m voting a big no on this. There is no excuse for any school that places a vulnerable student’s mental health stability into the unqualified and immature hands of a fellow student. Too many things can go wrong, for both the troubled child and the mentor.
But wait there’s more. And this is an even more insidious threat to the long-term welfare of our children. Under the excuse of “safety” many schools have adopted tracking software that uses AI to monitor your child’s school Ipad, phone and other devices they use. They are looking for indication of self-harm and also, possible school violence. My colleague Marsha Metzger has detailed this in her Parents on the Level videos.
So we are into Orwellian territory. What should we do?
I suggest we end all the school frameworks invading child privacy. This is getting too intrusive and is probably already being misused. We should end the class-wide lessons on suicide directed to kids themselves—the topic is too risky-- and be watchful for individual troubled students instead.
Let's concentrate on teacher training minus the woke propaganda. Open up for teacher consideration the concept that homosexual and gender confused feelings are not beneficial, not normative, but indicate underlying mental health concerns and possible abuse.
And banish the destructive anti-parent attitudes.
Families, the most hopeful guidance you can give your children is to share the life they can live in Jesus.
I am reminded of the chorus of a popular Christian song:
You called my name, and I ran out of that grave
Out of the darkness, into your glorious day.
Let's stop dwelling on danger and death as we interact with our children. I know we are trying to prevent tragedy. But let’s try not to create more tragedy along the way. Instead, let’s stand on the truth that our kids need messsages of life and hope.
