US teenager's parents sue school over depression screening test
BMJ 2005; 331 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.331.7519.714-a (Published 29 September 2005) Cite this as: BMJ 2005;331:714
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1. The true prevalence of mental disorders among children in the
United States has been estimated in many different ways. The statistics
change depending on many variables. Thus, every report is only an estimate
of the true prevalence.
The NHIS by the CDC relies on parent reports about their child having
a "definite or severe difficulty" in a variety of emotional or behavioral
domains. As indicated in a previous response, recent data are that 5% of
children's parents indicated that they had these problems (that's still
high at 1 in 20). However, the same survey in 1998-99, concluded that
"13.6 percent (7 million children) had a mental health problem" - see
Mental Health, United States, 2002.
http://www.mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/cmhs/MentalHealthStatistics/
2. As a comparison, one might examine results from a survey of high
school children, conducted by the same agency (CDC) - the annual Youth
Risk Behavior Survey (2003). Here we find that 28.6% of high school
students reported feeling "so sad or hopeless almost every day for at
least 2 weeks in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities."
Additionally, 16.9% of students reported having "seriously considered
attempting suicide" and 8.5% report actually attempting suicide in the
past 12 months. This points to both the importance of identifying the
students who are feeling suicidal and the difference in rates of problems
depending on how surveys are conducted. Consider that this survey does not
even ask about difficulties with anxiety, eating disorders, or other
conditions. - http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/SS/SS5302.pdf
3. There are many types of screening that are conducted every day in
a variety of settings, including schools - for various health conditions,
learning problems, etc. In the case of mental health screening, as with
screening for other medical conditions, the purpose is not to "diagnose."
The purpose is to inform the individual about a potential problem that
should be followed up with a health or mental health professional who can
conduct a more thorough assessment.
4. As I understand it, the TeenScreen program encourages schools to
get both active parental consent and the assent of the student. Also, the
TeenScreen program does not administer most of the surveys, they act as a
consultant and provider of the software.
5. TeenScreen actively denies receiving any funds from pharmaceutical
agencies, and I have yet to see any evidence of funding by pharmaceutical
companies. Thus, those claims should probably be ignored until such
evidence is produced. One posting claimed to have sources for this claim,
but did not produce any references or sources. I would be interested in
examining any such evidence for myself.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
I thank the British medical community for being the first to
recognize and
take action concerning the dangers of psychiatric drugs on the human body.
And the BMJ for its most recent article concerning TeenScreen.
I understand that publishing the full story may be controversial, but
it should
be stated that billions of dollars are at stake for the pharmaceutical
industry
in finding new markets for its drugs. The Orwellian-named and -conceived
New Freedom Commission on Mental Health was a boon to the industry in
setting the agenda for the psychiatric drugging of every single American,
beginning with children as an accesible market in the public school
system.
If there is any insanity requiring intervention, it is the idea that
redefining
normal life responses as "mental illnesses" to effect the sale of one's
product
is ethical or useful. The second illogic is that a collection of questions
and
interpretations of their answers can be used to determine a person's
mental
state, without further investigation, including tests for any of the
multiple
sources of mental anguish resulting from physical conditions. The third
is
that, despite ample evidence that SSRIs lead to suicide, such drugs are
being
touted as the solution to suicide in children.
Having watched and investigated the psychiatric and pharmaceutical
cartel for
a number of years, I find I have no argument with its senior members when
they admit to having no clue about the cause of or cure for mental
illness.
“We do not know the causes (of psychiatric disorders). We don’t have
methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” Director of the U.S. National
Institute
of Mental Health, Rex Cowdry, 1995.[1]
“The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the
mentally ill
is gone. In the future, the mentally ill will have to learn to live with
their
illness.” Norman Sartorius, president of the World Psychiatric
Association,
1994 [2]
This is not the forum for detailing exactly why psychiatry is junk
science, but
suffice to say, if it were not, it would obtain some positive results. Yet
study
after study not paid for by pharmaceutical companies pushing their own
drugs, shows harmful effects and less positive outcomes than sugar pills.
The main problem with their theory of a chemical imbalance in the
brain as
the cause of behavioral disorders is that no tests exist to determine the
chemical status of a person’s brain while he is living, and no delivery
system
exists to replenish any supposed "prozac deficiency," for instance, to a
specific part of the brain.
But this doesn’t discourage psychs from misdiagnosing
tens of
millions of people as having these “diseases.” Or pharmaceutical companies
from making psychiatric drugs to treat these made-up diseases.
I am happy to respond to any queries from youre readership, including
challenges from the pharmaceutical and psychiatric cartels, concerning any
of
my statements, and to back them up with specifics.
Sincerely,
Steven Ferry
1 Testimony given by Dr. Rex William Cowdry, Acting Director of the National Institute of Mental Health before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 104th Congress, First Session, “Part 4, National Institutes of Health,” section on the National Institute of Mental Health, Washington, D.C., 22 Mar. 1995, p. 1205.
2 Lars Boegeskov, “Mentally Ill have to have Help—Not to be Cured,” Politiken, 19 Sept., 1994.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
If your family doctor said, "I've looked at your son and he looks
like he has cancer, we're going start chemo in the morning," would you do
it?
If your family doctor said, "I've looked at your son and he looks
like he has diabetes, roll up his sleeve I'm going to give him a shot of
insulin" would you blink? Would you scream, ARE YOU CRAZY!
Then when the psychiatrist say's, "Your son looks like he has ADD,
let's start him on a class 2 drug that's in the same classification as
Cocaine and Morphine" why don't you blink then?
There are lab tests for the causess of every single one of the
symptoms they acribe to being ADD. Now get this white elephant for just
one minute. They don't have a lab test for actually having ADD, but they
do have a lab test for the causes of the ADD-like symptoms. Why aren't we
taking those first?
Nutrient depletion in B-12 will cause depression and mood swings.
Reference? You can look that up anywhere, there is no science supporting
that B-12 deficiency doesn't cause these symptoms.
Lead toxicity will cause hyperactivity, memory loss and hostility.
Reference? Find someone who says it doesn't. Any med school nutritional
text book will have this in it.
Trigger foods are another cause of ADD-like symptoms. Notice the week
after Halloween is hyper-week at school? Does a kid eating a candy bar in
the morning, need a drug in the afternoon? No, duh.
I was diagnosed with ADD at 39. My first thought was, "If I didn't
even know I had it for 39 years, how bad could it be?"
I was told that I couldn't sit still very well. My reply was, "I
don't sit for a living, I stand up". I was told that I can't keep quiet.
My reply was, "I talk for a living, it's how I put food on the table."
I was also told I can't concentrate, my reply was, "Isn't that why I
can create?" I was told that when I read I have a learning disability. My
reply, "When I learn by experiencing or hands on, I learn faster."
I was told that I don't mind, don't listen and have an authority
problem. My reply was, "So does Donald Trump, Walt Disney and Bill Gates,
it's called wanting to be my own boss and not an employee."
How do I see what they call ADD? Being ADD is like being a bull in a
china shop, there is nothing wrong with being a bull, you just don't
belong in a china shop." Meaning people like me will never work in an
assembly line or toll booth.
Notice most parents don't give meds to their children on the weekends
and summer break? Notice the kids get off the meds when they leave school
and join the work force in a right-brained creative job that doesn't
require them to sit still, with their hands folded, being quiet?
Maybe school is a precursor to meds in the US. 90% of Ritalin is sold
to the US school market, not the rest of the world school market. Maybe
it's not our children, maybe it's our schools and their connection to Big
Pharma
and Psychiatry?
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
After discussing what I see as the issues, I end with a personal
anecdote from my teen years.
It seems to me there are two overlapping issues here:
(1) The issue of the nation-state interfering with the private
individual/family in general
(2) The issue of using psychiatry to attempt to solve personal and
societal problems
The first is, strictly speaking, part of the subject called political
philosophy.
In this, I know my own view: the state should force indiviudals with
threat where other individuals may come to harm. The state should not
force individuals for their own "benefit". I believe that the state, and
agents of the state, do not know what is best for me more than I do.
Further, I do not believe that the state is sufficiently motivated to do
what is best for me, even if it did know. Finally, even if I choose to
behave in a way that is harmful to myself, this is an issue for my
friends, family, employers and community, but not the state. The state may
or may not offer help through active participation in the community, but
to "enforce help" - no.
Note, the buzzword in political philosophy is "choice" which implies free
will and ability to choose.
The second is an emotive and controversial issue. Traditionally, the
assisting with personal and societal ills is the domain of the pastor.
This position has been usurped by psychiatry. Psych-iatry means soul-
doctor. He claims to know better than the pastor how to be at peace with
oneself and society.
To me it is obvious that psychiatry is mutually exclusive with religous or
spiritual belief. The one is based on the idea that you are "chemicals in
the brain" and the other that you have a spiritual existence of some sort.
Thus the very word psychiatry is a misnomer, as he is not a soul-doctor.
But neither is he a brain-doctor, because that's a neurologist...
Now I ask you to connect that with the concept of "choice" mentioned
above. If you are nothing but "chemicals in the brain" then there is no
such thing as "choice" - your body does what your brain commands, and you
brain does what the chemicals command, all by mechanistic laws of physics
and chemistry, and so when the psychiatrist gives you a drug, his brain
chemicals are altering your brain chemicals (via a prescription pad), and
"you" don't fit into it except as as a non-defined entity which gets to
passively "feel" better except what is it that is "feeling" better except
some chemicals in a different part of the brain?
Political choice implies that you exist as an entity that can make
choice; that is not necessarily determined by physical laws but which has
a non-physical/chemical component. An entity that is thinking, emoting,
planning, intending, dreaming, communicating and living.
In other words, psychiatry goes hand-in-hand with a top-heavy
dictatorial state, an authoritarian attitude, loss of personal freedom,
because, after all, there's no "you" to be free anyway. How can chemicals
be "free"? It also goes hand-in-hand with irresponsibility, amorality and
personal degradation.
Whilst believing in your own existence as a being, acknowledging others as
existing as beings and having some sense of a spiritual side to existence
goes hand-in-hand with being free and having choice and responsibility.
Whilst historically religion has many times "turned psychiatric" in
its form, most people I talk to are astute and quite able to seperate (for
example) the teachings of Jesus from the Inquisition, the teachings of
Mohammed from 9/11 or the teachings of Bhuddha from stone idols.
Where it religion has lost its path, the result has been an eventual back-
lash resulting in a very clear demand that the state and religion have
nothing to do with each other. And so it should be with psychiatry.
And if the state has no right to enforce religious dogmas, I do not see
why it has a right to enforce psychiatric dogmas.
I do not trust psychiatry. I do not trust psychiatrists. I think
psychiatry is founded on false principles. I think psychiatrists have
demonstrated incompetence and downright inhumanity too often. I have seen
and known too many whom psychiatry has ruined with its "help".
I would rather sort out "mental" problems I have by talking to
friends and family than by seeing a psychiatrist. The state and its agents
have no right to force psychiatry on anyone, least of all me or my
children.
Anecdote:
At the age of 14 I had a crush on a girl at school, who rejected my
advances. Following that I went through a period of "depression" or
feeling sad or sorry for myself, and was quite a different person during
that time. I found my own way out. I took a little while and had some dead
-ends. I ended up looking at what life really meant to me. All in all I'm
actually pretty happy with the way things turned out. I'm doing well in
life for myself and family.
I *shiver* at the thought that had that been 2007 instead of 1987, I may
have been labelled for life and put on drugs by someone who believes in
nothing but brains on the one hand, but who's techniques fall far far
short of scientific standard on the other.
I am thankful TeenScreen did not exist when I was at school. I will fight
every move to introduce it before my children are through school.
Thank you for reading.
Stewart
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
This is worse than ridiculous.
The nation is creating millions of drug addicts which will be a
constant drain on its future, not to mention that many of those children
will become unemployable and disabled as a result of the course they are
being set on.
The sooner and the greater volumes of litigation begin, the better.
Political leaders and their advisors who enable these 'screening'
programmes to occur should be held personally accountable for the outcome.
The advisors know the risks for the young people involved.
Psychiatry is NOT a proven science. Everyone knows this. The
damage and injuries psychiatry has done over countless years, to millions
of vulnerable people, whether 'ill', handicapped, or indeed neither at
outset, but experiencing normal responses to abnormal situations, the
psychiatry experience is a shameful blight on what we like to think of as
civilization.
To ignore this past, whilst taking risks with the future is utmost
folly and irresponsibility.
Competing interests:
None
Competing interests: No competing interests
I am totally opposed to diagnosing our young people with psychiatric
illnesses and giving them psychotropic meds. Based on the materials I
study they can be dangerous to their developing brains. I having been
studying some info that suggests that just our diets alone can be enough
to cause substantial damage to our brains. Why isn't our government
looking at that? (Drug companies? Money?) Why aren't they looking at PET
Scans so we can understand how our brains are being damaged?
I was amazed a few years ago when I heard that someone had done PET
Scans on some of the worst criminals in prison (the worst of the worst).
They found that the more severe the crime had been the more severe the
brain damage was in that person.
I have a real problem with the pyschiatric community just looking at
the emotional and behavioral symptoms and not addressing the biological,
other than saying chemical imbalance, when it comes to our (biological
!!!!) brain. It is an organ in our bodies just like any other organ.
I am trying to educate myself so I don't feel like my ignorance is
part of the problem in what is happening to our young people. Most of what
I personally experience is what psychiatry refers to as "Dual Diagnosis"
(substance abuse and mental illness)
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
The disrespect for parental rights perpetrated by this parctice is
just insulting, Beneficial or not any parent has the right to know exactly
what is going on with their kids, who is doing it and what it consists of.
So many normal human reactions are now called abnormal and medicated that
it is alarming. I wonder if in a few years there will not be facist
aproach to health, where personal choices are just disregarded and only
authorities can excercise the right of informed concent in your stead? In
a society full of human beings prone to error,where misdiagnosis are so
common; where second opinions and third opinions are so vital, To blindly
allow any sort of screening and labling; to impartially trust a teacher or
doctor is at best stupid. Know what anyone is doing with your kids, why
and how, then make your own decitions after FULLY RESEARCHING BOTH SIDES
OF THE STORY. You have to be always on guard this day and age, if you want
your kids to reach a mature happy age.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
We received several dozen additional responses making a similar point--that TeenScreen is primarily a tool of the pharmaceutical industry to
increase its profits.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
In a not so obscure program in the heart of the inner-city there is a
program with the sole responsibility of moving teens from the very
unstable place of growing up in an often unfriendly environment to become
healthy, contributing members of our society.
These teens are faced with choices today that would have been
considered unthinkable just a decade ago; How do I make it to class
without being accosted by the drug dealers or gang members who by the way
happen to be my friends.
14-year-old girls are being forced to perform unthinkable acts upon
boys their age to remain part of the group. Our answer to the problems
facing our teens today has been to often to drug them with mind-altering
drugs.
We are not confronting the real issues of illiteracy, drug abuse,
violence and crime. We are covering these issues up with an even greater
crime, the legal drugging of our children.
Who is really benefiting from this action? It certainly is not the
teen that comes into my office uncertain of her future because she cannot
make choices on her own any more. It is not the parent who's rights are
constantly being undermined and bypassed by the government and others not
intimately knowledgeable of these youths backgrounds and individual
circumstances.
I have the pleasure of working in an institution that makes a habit
of working to identify the actual causes of the students poor behavior and
academic deficiencies and then addressing those specific problems and not
mask them.
As a result of this philosophy, we have a more than 78% success rate
at getting teens off drugs, out of a life of crime and living lives of
success and positive contribution to society.
By the way, we do this by removing the drugs teens are using. This
includes street as well as unnecessary pharmaceutical drugs. We do this
by increasing the level of responsibility the youth take for the condition
they are in and increasing their ability to make pro-survival choices.
Teen Screen is a dangerous and invasive approach to real problems.
It does not put the power and control in the teen or the parent's hands.
It takes away the ability to think critically and to make positive choices
and decisions.
I and every parent we have worked with vehemently opposes Teen
Screen. We urge you to look very closely at the fine print of this
proposal and reject it in its entirety.
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Hanan Islam
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests
Mental Health should receive General Health Approach
Unfortunately, there are many individuals who still do not yet
embrace the
fact that mental health is an important part of an individual's general
health
and should be approached in a similar manner. You cannot separate mind
and body. If one experiences a general health problem, they seek help,
sometimes are screened to determine if they are considered in a high risk
group that might necessitate them seeking further diagnostic tests, then,
depending on their diagnosis, a series of recommendations or actions await
them to that can affect their overall health. Perhaps they need to
evaluate life
style or diet changes; counseling may be in order (nutrition/diet
counseling,
stress management, psychological counseling, marital counseling; and
sometimes, when personal changes are not effective, medication is
considered. This goes for individuals with diabetes, cancer, vision
or hearing problems, weight issues, mental health issues, and high blood
pressure-- to name just a few. No one is pushing drugs, no one is trying
to
label...the intent is to be proactive and intervene early on when a
problem
exists. Medical literature has proven that screening and early
intervention
results in more positive patient outcomes. It is indeed unfortunate that
those
whom do not embrace mental health as an important aspect of our general
health feel it is their right to try to infuence society into believing
that good
medical practices related to identifying and treating those with mental
health
issues are based on malicious intent to drug our society and do harm,
rather
than understanding that one is just taking care of their 'whole' self.
Competing interests:
None declared
Competing interests: No competing interests