7 July, 2006
Group launches campaign to stop millions of federal dollars allocated for student screening
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) announced the launch of its public awareness campaign to prevent millions of federal dollars being dispersed for “mental illness” screening of all 52 million American schoolchildren. Last month The Washington Post reported, “The federal government is directing tens of millions of dollars to expand [‘mental illness’] screening nationwide.” The screening includes subjective questions based on the American Psychiatric Associations’ Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In April, a study published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics exposed DSM panel members’ links to pharmaceutical companies that make $27 billion a year in psychiatric drug sales based on prescriptions for DSM “disorders.”
Spokesperson for CCHR, Mr. Bruce Wiseman, a former teacher, said, “The Orwellian plan to screen every American student for ‘mental disorders,’ based on an unscientific list of questions and which has an 84% failure rate in accurately identifying students supposedly at risk, will only lead to greater numbers of children being drugged and, consequently, escalate the suicide, homicide and drug abuse rate among children and adolescents.”
The federal funds have been allocated despite unprecedented drug regulatory agency alerts and studies warning that many psychiatric drugs prescribed for children can cause aggression, violence, heart attacks, strokes, addiction, diabetes, psychosis, tumors, suicide and death. In November, the Food and Drug Administration ordered that labeling for the antidepressant Effexor XR (extended release) carry a warning that patients can experience "homicidal ideation" while taking it.
CCHR was the first to expose that teen school shooters had been taking antidepressants or psychiatric stimulants, including Eric Harris, ringleader in the Columbine school massacre in 1999. In October 2004, the FDA also ordered that antidepressants carry a “black box” warning that they can induce suicide in children and adolescents taking them.
One of the screening programs proposed for federal funding is TeenScreen™, the brainchild of Dr. David Shaffer, a psychiatrist from Columbia University who, at the request of a drug manufacturer, tried to stop the British drug regulatory body in 2003 from warning that antidepressants cause suicide in those under 18 years of age.
Proponents of TeenScreen falsely claim that it can prevent suicides. However, Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, says, “They’re pulling numbers out of thin air—falsely presuming that this crisis is about lack of access to drugs and calling for government to provide more and more of what many of us believe is the wrong kind of treatment.”
That “wrong treatment” includes mind-altering drugs. While psychiatrists claim that antidepressants decrease suicide, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Despite a dramatic increase in treatment, no significant decrease occurred in suicidal thoughts, plans, gestures, or attempts in the United States during the 1990s.” The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts in primary care, said it had “found no evidence that screening for suicide risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality.”
A 2005 study by Dr. David Healy and Graham Aldred from the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, Cardiff University, Wales, reported that Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) antidepressants (Prozac, Zoloft, and Effexor etc.) increase the risk of suicide, especially compared to people taking placebos (dummy pills.)
Dr. Shaffer admits there is a large chance that children who are not suicidal could be wrongly identified with the TeenScreen testing, saying that 84 non-suicidal teens could be referred for further evaluation for every 16 youths “correctly identified.”
Kelly Patricia O’Meara, former congressional staff, responded to this in her book, Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills That Kill, stating: “In other words, based on Shaffer’s study of his own test, 84 students out of 100 will be incorrectly identified as suffering from a specific mental illness. One has to wonder if parents of America are informed of this astonishing statistic as part of information to consider when having to decide whether or not to allow the mental health screening test.”
Nor are parents informed that psychiatrists admit they do not know the cause or cure of any “mental disorder” they are identifying children as suffering. In May, APA members admitted this in interviews at their annual conference which CCHR has released on its website.
CCHR’s campaign includes a touring exhibit showing the dangers of psychiatric screening that frequently leads to children and adolescents being prescribed powerful psychotropic (mind altering) drugs. Hundreds of thousands of parents can be informed about the risks of mental health screening and be alert to it being introduced in their children’s schools.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. CCHR is renowned for its tenacity in protecting parental and children’s rights. In 2004, it helped achieve the passage of the federal Child Medication Amendment that prohibits school personnel from forcing children onto psychiatric drugs as a requisite for their education. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights@cchr.org.
