My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness.

Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, counselor assistant or something like that at a very large school in Texas. She quit after just a few months because she could see that they were just using her position as a funnel to get kids on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. She was literally reprimanded more than once because she recommended against putting some of the students on drugs and pushed them toward professional counseling instead. The parents are often clamoring to get a diagnosis so they can get their kids on drugs to ‘fix’ their problems, so it’s not exclusively the fault of the government, but they’re damn sure doing their part.

They’re drugging our children, MOST often unnecessarily. Perhaps if we used other methods to help, we would see other outcomes.