#trauma informed

By: Carolyn D. Gorman

Published: Jun 15, 2026

Last week, in a mostly partisan vote, the House Appropriations Committee approved its fiscal year 2027 spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Tucked into the bill is $243.6 million for the Department of Education’s Safe Schools and Citizenship Education account, intended to keep students safe under Title IV, Part F of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The account’s name no longer describes what it funds. Originally, federal school safety funding was meant to focus largely on physical security, violence prevention, discipline, and emergency preparedness. But policymakers increasingly view school safety through a mental-health lens, treating schools as mental-health clinics though no evidence suggests that the education system can treat mental-health conditions better than clinical settings can. The FY27 bill codifies this transformation: it directs roughly 70 percent of the account to three school-based mental-health grants—and makes those allocations, listed in a committee report table, legally binding.

The legally binding aspect deserves attention. Committee reports typically break down an account’s funding in tables that have no legal force; they simply act as guidance for agencies, which customarily follow them. This bill, however, contains language that the funding allocations “shall be … in the amounts specified” in the report table. That means the Department of Education would be required by law to spend the precise amounts detailed on those exact mental-health activities.

The practice of making table allocations legally binding has become more common in recent budget cycles. It locks in program allocations against an executive branch willing to withhold and redirect funds for programs it wants to eliminate—including these mental-health grants. There’s good reason for the administration’s approach: the spending buys little that’s good and a lot that’s bad. If the bill reaches the House floor for a vote as written, members should not let it pass.

Consider what actually drives school safety problems: unsafe schools are a function of unenforced discipline and unfollowed behavioral codes of conduct, academic disengagement, inadequate physical infrastructure, poor attendance, and family breakdown. When safety issues reflect unmet clinical needs, it’s from very serious cases—like early signs of psychosis—that schools cannot address. Most school-based mental-health programs flag kids with even slight distress for potential intervention and push them toward the mental-health system for diagnosis. These programs have not made students any safer.

The track record of school-based mental health efforts is not impressive. These programs fit the public-health model of mental health—awareness trainings, universal screenings, expanded counseling staff—meant to direct students toward the mental-health system. A 2018 systematic review in Psychological Medicine examined school-based prevention programs, finding their evidence base weak and mostly low-quality; the authors could not conclude that the programs improved outcomes; universal mental-health screening produces up to 90 percent false positives, driving overdiagnosis.

A 2025 review in Child and Adolescent Mental Health went further: universal prevention is less effective than targeted efforts, its benefits are null or short-lived, and it can even cause harm. Direct services fare no better: a gold-standard randomized controlled trial using 19 years of data found that access to school-based mental-health services increased students’ usage of those services—though it’s not clear whether use increased for students who needed them, or those who didn’t and were treated anyway. Regardless, the services improved neither test scores nor attendance. A multiyear Toronto study found that heavy investment in school-based screening and treatment produced more diagnoses and more medicated children—again, without clarity about whether that treatment was appropriate or needed, and with no academic improvement.

The statutory funding authority for two of the grants—the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grants and the School-Based Mental Health Services Grants—has expired, yet the appropriations committee is continuing them at elevated spending levels despite no evidence they’re effective.

The third and fourth programs of the account have drifted, too. Project SERV originally provided emergency assistance following school violence or traumatic events. But the concept of “trauma” meriting federal intervention has broadened substantially, medicalizing ordinary adversity and extending psychological intervention into ever more corners of kids’ lives. National Programs for School Safety have also become a way to stuff in mental-health awareness programming, which turns kids and teachers into pseudo-screeners identifying one another for potential mental-health conditions.

Much of the school-based mental-health enterprise is ideology cloaked in caring or clinical language. Consider “trauma-informed” practice: it sounds unobjectionable, but the label routinely covers political activism. California’s statewide math framework, for instance, cites as its evidentiary support for “trauma-informed pedagogy” a study in which a teacher converted a number-line exercise into a lesson on “food deserts,” showed students a video of a single mother struggling to afford food, and asked the kids how it made them feel. Students cried, expressed anger at the government, and committed to political activism—which the study author counted as “radical healing.” All this in math class! Whether the students ever learned to add and subtract went unexamined; the study reported that all students passed and enjoyed the tasks.

A “Safe Schools” account label is now entirely misleading. Congress is treating school counselors and psychologists, social-emotional learning programs, and woke wellness messages as primary solutions to genuine safety challenges. It’s analogous to having social workers respond to 911 calls for homeless adults with untreated serious mental illness.

Congressional leadership will now decide when (or whether) the bill will be considered by the full House, which will debate the bill and vote on amendments before final passage. House Republicans need to wake up here. Youth mental health matters. But funding mental-health mission creep in the education system is not the way to address it.

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Abstract

Background Although school-based programmes for the identification of children and young people (CYP) with mental health difficulties (MHD) have the potential to improve short- and long-term outcomes across a range of mental disorders, the evidence-base on the effectiveness of these programmes is underdeveloped. In this systematic review, we sought to identify and synthesise evidence on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of school-based methods to identify students experiencing MHD, as measured by accurate identification, referral rates, and service uptake.

Method Electronic bibliographic databases: MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, ERIC, British Education Index and ASSIA were searched. Comparative studies were included if they assessed the effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of strategies to identify students in formal education aged 3–18 years with MHD, presenting symptoms of mental ill health, or exposed to psychosocial risks that increase the likelihood of developing a MHD.

Results We identified 27 studies describing 44 unique identification programmes. Only one study was a randomised controlled trial. Most studies evaluated the utility of universal screening programmes; where comparison of identification rates was made, the comparator test varied across studies. The heterogeneity of studies, the absence of randomised studies and poor outcome reporting make for a weak evidence-base that only generate tentative conclusions about the effectiveness of school-based identification programmes.

Conclusions Well-designed pragmatic trials that include the evaluation of cost-effectiveness and detailed process evaluations are necessary to establish the accuracy of different identification models, as well as their effectiveness in connecting students to appropriate support in real-world settings.

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"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." – Abraham Maslow

This is how you create mental health hypochondriacs.

"Mental health" is important, but it has become an ideology of its own, that everything needs to be viewed as a threat to, or caused by, mental health. Particularly as they get extra funding for each child "diagnosed" with a condition. No wonder they want this embedded in.

None of which helps the student. Instead of saying, you need to show up to class and do the homework or you're being held back, they're instead the victim of some pathology and no longer responsible for themselves. They're disempowered and helpless with an external locus of control.

I’m an abuse survivor. I got out, I’m still getting through it, and I know exactly what that does to you. I know what it feels like to want to hurt people because you were hurt first. I know what it feels like when manipulation becomes second nature, when you learn how to shut your emotions off just to survive, when you have to read every situation like your life depends on it. Because sometimes it did.

So when I look at characters like Klaus Mikaelson, I don’t just see I see someone who was taught from the beginning that love comes with pain, that family can hurt you worse than anyone else, and that if you don’t have power, you don’t survive. Of course he controls everything. Of course he lashes out the second he feels threatened. That didn’t come out of nowhere—that’s learned behavior.

When I look at Damon Salvatore, I don’t just see someone who makes reckless or cruel choices. I see someone who learned to bury everything under anger and sarcasm because that was safer than being vulnerable. He pushes first. He hurts first. Because in his mind, that’s how you stay in control. That’s how you don’t get hurt again.

And Katherine Pierce… she is survival in its rawest form. She lies, she manipulates, she runs, she chooses herself every time. People love to reduce her to selfishness, but what she was taught is that if she doesn’t choose herself, nobody will. That kind of mindset doesn’t just disappear. It becomes instinct.

Even someone like Rebekah Mikaelson—people call her impulsive or dramatic, but look at where she came from. She had to fight to be seen, fight to be heard, fight to have any control over her own life. So when she takes what she wants or reacts strongly, that’s not random. That’s someone who learned that if she doesn’t grab onto something, it’ll be taken from her.

And Kai Parker is what happens when isolation and neglect go too far. When someone is completely cut off, taught they don’t matter, and only gets attention when they’re dangerous. Of course he leans into that. That’s the only version of himself the world ever responded to.

That’s the point people keep missing. These behaviors—control, manipulation, lashing out, hurting first—they’re not just “bad choices” in a vacuum. They’re patterns. They’re survival strategies that got out of control.

I’m not sitting here pretending they didn’t do horrible things. They did. You can hold them accountable. You should hold them accountable.

But here’s what I’m saying—you can do that without dismissing where it came from.

You don’t have to tack on “just because they were abused doesn’t mean they had to act that way” like it’s some kind of moral disclaimer. You can literally hold them responsible for their actions without reducing their abuse to a footnote.

Because when you say it like that, over and over, with nothing behind it, it stops being meaningful. It turns into a way to avoid actually engaging with what their trauma did to them.

If you’re going to say that, then be specific. Talk about the moment they had a choice. Talk about what alternatives existed in their world. Talk about why that choice matters. Actually back it up.

Klaus Mikaelson doesn’t control everything for no reason. Damon Salvatore doesn’t lash out for no reason. Katherine Pierce doesn’t choose herself every time for no reason. Those patterns come from somewhere.

Acknowledging that doesn’t mean you’re excusing them. It means you’re actually understanding them.

And that’s my issue. Not that people hold them accountable—but that people act like accountability and understanding can’t exist at the same time.

They can. They should.

You don’t have to like them. I’m not asking you to. You don’t have to forgive them either. But don’t sit there and act like their abuse is just a small detail you can mention once and then ignore while you list everything they’ve done wrong. That’s not how this works.

Because when you say “it’s not an excuse” and stop there, you’re skipping the part where abuse actually changes how someone thinks, reacts, and survives. You’re skipping the part where those behaviors come from somewhere real.

And yeah, they could get help. In real life, people can get help. But what happens when you’re raised to believe that asking for help makes you weak? What happens when survival meant never letting your guard down? That doesn’t just go away because someone says it should.

You don’t get to choose what happens to you even when you’re an adult — because you don’t have the skills and knowledge to know how to use your own agency, to be informed, to make decisions. There’s still a level of helplessness that emotionally privileged people don’t understand.