Newsom’s mental health apps won’t save the children
California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to give your kids mental health counseling, on their phones.
This week, the Office of the Governor announced the launch of two new apps to provide “digital mental health support for youth, young adults and families.”
The Brightlife Kids app is said to provide “Mental health coaching and resources for parents with kids ages 0-12.” The Soluna app is for kids directly, without their parents’ involvement. It’s said to offer “Mental health coaching and resources for teens and young adults ages 13-25.”
According to the state’s website, this “groundbreaking new program” will provide mental health support that is “free, safe and confidential.” At solunaapp.com, where young teens can download the app to their phones, the state promises that users can use interactive tools such as “Mood Log,” chat oneon-one with a “coach,” and get or give advice in the Soluna forums.
It’s “Always anonymous,” the state promises. “Rest assured that your app experience is completely anonymous and your data is private and secure.”
California promises complete data privacy and security. That and six dollars will buy you a cup of coffee.
Let’s start with the obvious risk that sexual predators could take advantage of protected anonymity to pose as a teen and “give advice.” And that’s without even looking into the possibility that people with bad motives could find a way to become “coaches” and chat one-on-one with vulnerable kids.
What’s the safeguard against that?
Then let’s look at the state’s track record on protecting confidential data. We could begin with the database of people who received COVID vaccines, which was opened up to a political consulting and organizing firm called Street Level Campaigns, LLC. Its self-described “sister organization,” Street Level Strategy, LLC, received “a list of booster eligible California residents” from the California Department of Public Health that included “names, age, gender, ethnicity, contact information and vaccination history.”
That’s according to the CDPH itself, which responded by email to questions about Street Level Strategy’s state contract when I looked into it in 2022. This despite the fact that the vaccination database, according to the state, was a “confidential registry.”
Then there was that data leak of the entire confidential database of Californians who held permits to carry a concealed weapon. The Office of the Attorney General investigated and concluded it wasn’t intentional. Super.
California’s information technology has, in general, been a cavernous sinkhole on the information highway. You probably heard about the Employment Development Department paying out tens of billions of dollars to fraudsters while actual unemployed Californians were hassled by delays and frozen accounts. Overdue upgrades to technology have been nightmarishly long and expensive at the Department of Motor Vehicles and even the State Controller’s office. FI$Cal, a state financial management system, was supposed to take six years and cost $138 million. That was in 2005. The price tag went over $1 billion sometime in 2022.
But cost is only a fraction of the problem.
“The state’s information security remains a high-risk issue,” wrote the California state auditor in an August 2023 report.
Now consider that the state is coaxing young teens to download an app to their cell phones that will let them connect with strangers to receive “advice.”
Last year, Newsom signed Assembly Bill 665 into law, allowing children as young as 12 years old to move into a residential facility for mental health services without the knowledge of their parents. Any number of “professionals” on the law’s newly-expanded list, even a “social work intern,” can decide that the child’s parents will not be told. And Medi-Cal will pay for it, creating a financial incentive to bring in clients.
Why is the state of California doing this?
It’s all part of Gov. Newsom’s “Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health,” released in August 2022. “The global pandemic put a spotlight on our nation’s mental health crisis — and the heavy toll borne by the youngest among us,” the report explains, without mentioning the role played by Newsom’s excessively long closure of public schools, not to mention outdoor playgrounds and even beaches, in the damage to California’s youngest residents.
Instead of closing the state prisons, the governor should be locked up in one of them.