| Absolutely a huge selection bias. My daughter did Sparks & Brownies and it ended up being a big clique of kids who all went to the same church & school and in the end she (a hyper sensitive, artistic, intellectual type child and a more solitary, introverted type) hated it and asked to quit it. I went through the same thing with Scouts when I was a boy. The kids that remain after the first couple years of cute crafts and silly games are the kids who like following along with group activities, like doing group organization stuff, and deal well with social groups and (often) cliques. Basically like sports, like a lot of elementary-level school (and a lot of other things in our society) -- the "odd" kids are selected against. So no surprise there's "good mental health" for people who are good at conforming to the norm. Because that's literally the definition of "good mental health" encoded in the DSM.
A disorder there is a deviation from the norm. |