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Mental Health Services Fund to fund various county mental health programs and requires counties to spend those funds on mental health services, as specified. The MHSA requires counties to establish a program designed to prevent mental illnesses from becoming severe and disabling and authorizes counties to use funds designated for prevention and early intervention to broaden the provision of those community-based mental health services by adding prevention and early intervention services or activities. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB638 And: I Changed My Mind About Kids and Phones. I Hope Everyone Else Does, Too. On the issue of kids, smartphones, and social media, a vibe shift is happening, and it’s happening on the left, right, and in the center. Here’s a survey of recent anti-phone discourse on the topic in politics and culture in recent weeks and months: The TikTok “ban” (don’t call it that) garnered bipartisan support in the House, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill making it illegal for people under 14 to have social media accounts in Florida. “People are so unwilling to blame iPhones as one of the main culprits in a variety of social ills but graphs like \[these\] are revealing. It’s obviously the phones,” zillennial writer Magdalene Taylor tweeted, semi-virally, attaching that infamous “teens today aren’t hanging out” graph. Hosts of two podcasts enjoyed by Very Online left-ish millennials, TrueAnon and Time to Say Goodbye, devoted episodes to making freewheeling arguments against the use of social media by kids. (Tyler Austin Harper, a professor at Bates who has written for Slate, even suggested on the latter show that smartphones should be made illegal for use by people under 18. Tyler! A take!) A trend piece in the Daily Beast uncovered interviewees from Gen Z who said that when they had kids, they certainly wouldn’t be letting them be “raised by” iPads. “Get offline. It is not alcohol, it is not porn, it is not weed, it is not blah blah, it is being online. Get offline,” wrote a Reddit user on Not so long ago, the default position, if one were an internet-savvy older person beginning to feel queasy when noticing groups of kids bent over their phones, was to say to oneself, “Well, that’s life; once, Socrates feared print’s effect on memory, and now, I fear this.” One definitely didn’t say out loud, online, “The kids shouldn’t have phones,” unless one were writing for the Atlantic. A weary “it has always been thus” pose toward the topic was in order—television, Walkmans, rock music, the youths are always up to something the adults think is stupid. Some of the resistance to wagging a finger at kids and phones was a totally fair allergy to generational analysis; another part of it was probably self-defense. “Some of us really don’t like our screen time habits criticized,” Taylor wrote in a follow-up Substack analyzing the replies to her recent “it’s the phones” provocation on X. “Others may think they appear smarter by 8