This is called the PHQ. It was designed by one of the pharma companies and pushed. Gov pays bonuses to hospitals/clinics/hospital systems who make sure a certain percentage of docs ask them. You can decline, but they will continue to ask at every visit. If the numbers add up, they are required to either prescribe a drug or refer you to a mental health facility/doctor so they can put you on drugs. Just like the "Pain Scale" it was created to push more drugs on unsuspecting patients. I've had to dig through Epic, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, Cerner, and NextGen for the data to make sure the hospital/clinic system I work for gets their cash. There are a lot of things like that. The guns question is added to the PHQ sent to schools, the one doctors use doesn't have that one, at least not in the systems I've worked with. If you send your kid to a public school and for whatever reason refuse to home school them, make sure they know that all that stuff can be declined and needs to be run past you. So many shady things happened to me growing up in public school that my mom was only aware of a fraction of. As an adult, I've told her the stories and she had no idea and would have refused to let me participate in a lot of the craziness. She was great and always backed me up - for example in high school I didn't want to go on the field trip to the holocaust stuff, she just marked NO on the permission slip and I got to read in the library all day. When they came to finger print us when I was very young, I threw a fit and they called her. She backed me up then, too. I kept saying I wasn't a criminal and refused the fingerprinting. My mom came to teh school and yelled at them about not asking her permission. She said "the only reason you want her fingerprints is to identify her dead body when you screw up" lol. My mom rocks. Kids do not know what is normal and what is not. No one should blindly trust their doctors.