Mental health screenings in schools affects parental rights

[Nevada]

anyone else heard this

Mental Health Screening in Schools Signals the End of Parental Rights
Nancy Levant

In the 2005-2006 school year, all parents will receive written notice of new policies from your children’s schools. Many schools will ask you to sign permission slips, allowing school counselors or “advocates” to have conversations with your children. You will be told how your local schools are now involved in vision and dental screenings, learning disabilities and speech impediment screenings, and other acts of kindness, but watch for the small print or the extra little blurb, which states that your children will also be evaluated for emotional wellness. Watch for wording like “happiness indicators” or “family participation.”
The fact is that our president has mandated that every American child, age 3 through 18, is federally ordered to be evaluated for mental health issues and to receive “enforced” treatment. Welcome to President Bush’s New Freedom Initiative and New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. Welcome to life-long profiling and drug addictions, New Freedom-style.

52 million students and six million adults working in schools, according to this commission, will be tested and should flush out at least 6 million people, or shall we say new customers, who will then be mandated to receive “treatment.” What treatment does our president’s commission have in mind? The newest drugs in the pharmaceutical pipelines, of course. The commission recommends “specific medications for specific conditions.”

One of the state-of-the-art treatments, and most expensive, is an implanted capsule – yes, that’s right, implanted. The capsule delivers medication into a child’s body without the child having to swallow a pill or the need for parental permission for dispensation.

The New Freedom Commission named the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) a model treatment plan. Medical algorithms are a flowchart-style treatment indicator. If you have A symptom and B symptom, take C medication. TMAP began with the University of Texas, big pharma, and the mental health and corrections system in Texas. The American Psychiatric Association concurs that TMAP is brilliant.

However, the New Freedom Initiative and Commission is a political-big pharma marriage. Many companies who supported TMAP were also major contributors to Bush’s re-election funds. For example, Eli Lilly manufactures olanzapine - one of the drugs recommended in the New Freedom plan, and furthermore, George Herbert Walker Bush was once a member of Lilly’s board of directors. Our current President Bush appointed Lilly’s chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, as a member of the Homeland Security Council. Eighty-two percent of Lilly’s $1.6 million in political contributions in 2000 went to Bush and the Republican Party. Do tell…

Texas Algorithm grossed over 4 billion dollars in 2003 and olanzapine is Eli Lilly's top selling drug. A 2003 New York Times article by Gardiner Harris claims that 70 percent of olanzapine sales are paid for by government agencies, such as Medicare and Medicaid. And lo and behold, guess who is now able to bill Medicaid for health services? Public schools, of course, as they are now under the big pharma-political profits/pay-back umbrella once they adopt screening policies. Public schools can now be paid to screen and drug your kids.

Now, if you ever wonder, ever again, if public-private partnerships care about people, then you need a brain transplant. Your children are now the legislated guinea pigs and lab rats for the pharmaceutical companies who bought and paid for our president’s campaign. Favors are now returned to those companies in the form of enforced, juvenile customers, their health, and their future drug addictions.

But wait, there is more. The New Freedom Commission also calls for enforced treatment. That means that parents have no rights to refuse the treatment recommenced by TMAP and other drug dispensing corporate-bureaucratic apparatuses. And as the mental health bureaucracy is also involved in this financial game of insidious cruelty, parents and families are also to be investigated via the result of their children’s screenings in schools. In other words, schools are now the across-the board, or shall I say nation, diagnostic tool for big pharma and child control.

And there’s more. The U.N. Agenda 21 has also called for total intrusion into schools and children lives. No more religion, no more individuality, no more real education, no more real grades, no more real teaching, no more teacher respect for parents, and no more truth from teachers or principals. This sounds very familiar and very political to me. And I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: if you are of a religious ilk and you refuse to allow your children to be abused by our “educational” system, the stage is being set for you to lose physical custody of your children. I suggest that you read this: Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century by Richard McKenzie, ed

Still got your kids in public schools? Shame on you, and may God bless your poor children and forgive you.

[Rhia]

Happily, Tori is currently in Montessori, starting Kindergarten in the fall.... and they just expanded to include 5th grade.... so I've got 6 years to figure out what to do next. *sigh*

[Eric McTavish]

Would'nt it be easer if the Gov just took the kids at school-age and trained them in education camps? That way the could weed out the undeseriables and teach the correct moral American virtues...

[Ysobelle]

I'd love to hear more about this from a somewhat less grossly opinionated source. I mean, yeah, it sounds horrendous, but I can't say I'm not totally against emotional screening for depression, OCD disorders, etc.

And I'm a little unclear about how schools are getting worse if you're religious. I mean, if you're Jewish, yeah. But if you're Christian, well, that's a whole 'nother story.

[Drea Beth]

I'd love to hear more about this from a somewhat less grossly opinionated source. I mean, yeah, it sounds horrendous, but I can't say I'm not totally against emotional screening for depression, OCD disorders, etc.

I'm with Nikki. I'd like to hear more. My first thought was how many teen suicides or school shootings could be prevented with something like this.

As a parent who has a child who has had many dealings with the mental health folks in school and with private counselors, I will say that never once has medication been suggested or thought of as an "easy out". Therapy, yes. I have been nothing but pleased with the quality of the mental healt professionals in our school district. They care about my child and have always been nothing but helpful . Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe the state of public education isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be.

[Lady Laurel]

This does sound more like someones political rant. There may be some facts that have been left out. I had heard of a bill that would give all children some kind of insurance. I cannot see where a law is going to get passed that a parent does not have the right to say no on giving thier children meds or second opinions.
I have heard of teachers being quick to say your child is ADD you need to put them on meds when they are a normal rambunctious child.
I don't understand where religion fits into all of this. I don't think it does.

[Jessa]

I think the stuff tossed in towards the end about religion is just the author's personal tangent, and I'm guessing was included because this was an opinion piece on a publication with a strongly religous audience.

Drea Beth, maybe you are lucky. When I was in school (graduated '98), many of my classmates had been diagnosed with mental illness, most commonly ADD. Most had been medicated for it at one point or another. A good friend of mine was bipolar, and her treatment actualy did help.

But, that was an exception. Most of these "ADD" kids were lacking in parental dicepline and involvement. One guy had tried the whole list of ADD drugs. Some helped him focus, but they all had side affects he disliked, such as making thinking in general slow and difficult, or physical symptoms. In the end, he and his parents found ways for him to be productive and stay out of trouble without chemical assitance. Kids often get doped because the parents can't deal with behavior that is within the relm of normal, but on the hyper side.

The shrinks are a part of this trend. Parents and/or educators claim the kid is unmanagable and demand they get counseling. The counselors just winding up handing out lithium, prozac and ritelin like candy, and everyone goes home "happy". Junior learns that drugs, not self discipline, are the road to success and happiness.

I know someone who go prozac because she told her general practitioner that she felt down, and wanted to try it. He just wrote he a prescription right there.

Sorry if this is getting a bit like a rant, but I see a huge overuse and abuse of mood alterting drugs and its disgusting. These drugs can and do help some people who really need them, but they are grossly over prescribed.

Being on some of these drugs can really change someone's whole personality, and some of them are also habit forming. This is NOT something you want to give a child/adolecent unless they have a serious need for it and will not be able to function well without it.

Also, government-ordered screenings for mental illness are more than a little scary, even without the manditory drug aspect. This information would end up as part of a permenent record on the patient, in a government database, and the commercial database of private contractors involved (drug companies, screening providers, etc). With the stigma attached to mental illness, testing positive on such a screening could set you up for being singled out for the rest of your life. Higher insurance, limited lob opportuneties to start with. Once a person is labeled as mentally ill, their competance can be questioned in numerous ways. They could even be denied basic rights and committed to a treatment facility.

Corrupt officials could use these screens and the resulting data to discredit rivals or have people committed on what would otherwise be shaky grounds.

Remember, the government is here to help, just like a big bother would...

[Rhia]

<snip>

But, that was an exception. Most of these "ADD" kids were lacking in parental dicepline and involvement. One guy had tried the whole list of ADD drugs. Some helped him focus, but they all had side affects he disliked, such as making thinking in general slow and difficult, or physical symptoms. In the end, he and his parents found ways for him to be productive and stay out of trouble without chemical assitance. Kids often get doped because the parents can't deal with behavior that is within the relm of normal, but on the hyper side.

The shrinks are a part of this trend. Parents and/or educators claim the kid is unmanagable and demand they get counseling. The counselors just winding up handing out lithium, prozac and ritelin like candy, and everyone goes home "happy". Junior learns that drugs, not self discipline, are the road to success and happiness.

I know someone who go prozac because she told her general practitioner that she felt down, and wanted to try it. He just wrote he a prescription right there.

Sorry if this is getting a bit like a rant, but I see a huge overuse and abuse of modd alterting drugs in my area its disgusting. These drugs can and do help some people who really need them, but they are grossly over prescribed.

Being on some of these drugs can really change someone's whole personality, and some of them are also habit forming. This is NOT something you want to give a child/adolecent unless they have a serious need for it and will not be able to function well without it.

<snip>

thank you
thank you
thank you

it frightens me how frequently the right pill is proposed as the solution...
kids need less phamaceuticals and more time on the playground to run off the energy - sure, some kids need help and sometiems that can mean monitored medication, but it seems lately, it's handed out with the booster shots!

Last summer I was horrified when my mother suggested I start taking her current pill "du jour" - some mood leveler.... when I asked her why, her answer came down to effectively because she and all her friends were taking it and they really liked it....



no thank you
not for me and not for my daughter
she's got a lot of energy and curiosity and talks incessantly, but I'm not gonna put her on drugs so she'll be quiet for five minutes!

[Miracle Wench]

I would need more info.To pass any kind of judgement. It is something to watch out for.
Thanks

[Wolves Lady]

This went around the home school community last year and caused a huge uproar. When I went to the website for our state that outlined the bill, the requirements suggested for mental health testing were not really all that out of line, and it seemed like people where getting themselves worked up over a nothing. There is no requirement that children be "forced" into being drugged against their parents will, if I remember correctly, it does require the parent to seek proper treatment for a child with a mental disorder, but that requirement is not necessarily medication. To me thats a "DUH". I think it also states that the state is required to provide treatment if the parent is unable to, which relieves the family of a potential financial burden.

Unfortunately there is a number of very vocal anti-public schoolers that seem to feel like if your child is in public school you are exposing them to the antichrist, or big brother, take your pick. The writer seems to fall into that category. I can look up in my mail archieves the rest of the parts that go to this article, but I may end up ranting a bit!