"No Child Left Unmedicated" Legitimate Governance or Bush's Payback to Drug Companies
 

Before this Orwellian plan of compulsory mental health testing and mandatory
medicating of all Americans diagnosed as having mental health "disorders"
actually becomes law, what is your opinion about the appropriateness of this?
(Apologies for all the information displayed here, but it is a serious issue and
it requires study if one's goal is to make an informed decision.)

"The Labor HHS appropriations bill contains block grant money that may be used by the States for a number of different programs at their discretion. Some critics are concerned that states will use this money to implement some form of mandatory mental testing program for all students throughout the school system. This concern stems largely from recommendations of New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, a non-policy making body created by President Bush in 2002 to propose ways of eliminating waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness of the mental health care delivery system. The Commission went far beyond their mission and recommended that schools be used as the means for discovering mental health problems.

The Commission's report does not specifically recommend screening ALL students. However, one could foresee how the recommendations in the report might lead to the mandatory screening of every child. For example, the report stresses that a major problem comes from undiagnosed children. They also suggest that "schools are in a key position to identify the mental health problems early and to provide a link to appropriate services." Any proposal that would lead to mandatory testing is dangerous and clashes with the principles which govern a free society.

Keep in mind, this commission has no legislative or executive power. Congress legislates and the Department of Health and Human Services implements policy.

The House and Senate HHS appropriations committees have appropriated $20 and $40 million respectively which could technically be used by each state to implement some form of mental health testing. This wouldn't be much more than $600,000 per state which is far short of the money needed to implement a mandatory system.
<a href="http://www.thelibertycommittee.org/update11.22.04.htm">Congressman Ron Paul (TX-14)</a>and others are currently working on committee report language that would require parental consent before any mental testing could occur." <a href="http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/hslda/200411/200411170.asp">http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/hslda/200411/200411170.asp</a>

Screen everyone you can for disorders. When you claim to find evidence of a disorder, hand out a treatment that only you can sell. Is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like the brainwashing process of the Church of Scientology?

two words
F'd up....

seriously, i know i probably would have been flagged at some point during school as having some form of mental illness ranging from mild depression to schizophrenia to ADD to you name it...the only thing is that i'm perfectly normal and those just happen to fall within my personality...i'd hate to imagine how much money they would make off me by prescribing drugs to make me more...conformist..

this really is some scary stuff

This gives me great fear.......

Guess I need drugs.

WTF are we doing to our society.

"Oh brave new world, that has such people in it."

Reminds me of the old travelling snake-oil salesman pitch. Everyone has problems. Your kid has problems. I can see it, but there is a solution. I just happen to have it and I will be happy to sell it to you.

Thank god, we have great companies like Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lily willing to step up to the plate and help America medicate herself properly. Not to mention all the good folks in the state and federal legislatures who are willing to put aside partisanship in the pursuit of the almighty dollar and in search of the blessed kickback.

Its nice to see bribrey is still alive and kicking in our government. Oops, did i say bribery? I meant lobbying.. yea that's it....

This whole idea is flawed on so many levels. What % of students wouldnt "benefit" from some form of medication? That kid is shy? Lets pump him full of drugs. That kid talks in class? Pump him full of drugs! Those two kids don'tlike eacher? Hell, they need some drugs! "oh! oh! oh! Teacher! I know the answer!" ... "Now, now, Billy... you didnt raise your hand... time for you to go down to the nurse's office to get pumped full of mind altering drugs!"

Any kind of drug that is used on a child to effect their "mental health" is bad in my opinion. ADD.. depression.. hyperactivity.. these are things that ALL children experience to some degree. I have an idea, instead of talking to the child and asking what could be wrong, and trying to deal with it that way, lets pump "tested" drugs into their body that have a chance to kill them. If they're dead they'll nolonger have any problems witht heir mental health - problem solved!

You will conform to our standards of normality, one way...or another.
You may pick up your khaki Dockers, Timberlands, polo shirt and cardigan sweater from the third blue eyed blonde on your left, on your way out.

Ladies and Gentlemen...will the last one out please turn off the light and lock the door. We're finished.

The first part of the original post:
The Commission's report does not specifically recommend screening ALL students
The first add-on:
The commission recommends "routine and comprehensive" testing and mental health screening for every child in the United States, including preschoolers.
Third add-on:
The report also recommends that every citizen in the United States should be screened for mental illness, including children.

Can someone explain how it went from it doesn't recommend something, to it does, and now it's for every person, not just kids?

This is just the sort of big-government liberalism I've come to expect from the Republican party.

This can't be serious.

Umm... somebody please tell me this is a joke :|

Probably no proposal in the report for kids to receive medical marijuana.

gee, i seem to remember that during the cold war one of the main critiques of the soviet psychiatric system was that they would treat all forms of deviance with drugs.

i am not clear at all--at all--about how the same kind of result would not be obtained by using schools as screening systems.

when i was dragged into trying to help my nephew a few years ago--he was having trouble in a nj public school system (it is an extremely complex story)--it became obvious right away that the school he was in was making no distinction between types of "deviance" and were warehousing kids with behavioural problems (insufficient "respect for authority") with those who had other types of developmental disorders--and the principal of the school was quite up front about it.

if you combine this with how, in the wonderful world of hmo-dominated "health care," psychotropics are too often used not as a supplement to other forms of therapy, but as a functional replacement for them.....if this story were to translate into policy, what would then matter is how the category was defined and who fell into it--because from within the system there would be little chance of appeal, little feedback.

god only knows what types of repression would develop out of this kind of logic merging with a conservative sense of the world---what types of opinion management would dovetail with the pathologization of all types of "social deviance" if the right gets to control the definition of deviance.


i do not see a single good side to this, and a hope that this proposal remains a sketchy paranoid fiction.

We screen children for vision, hearing, and other diseases. I recall standing in those lines in grade school.

If mental health IS a serious disease then its easy to argue in favor of such screenings.

I think the 'shut up and study!' method works better.

Oh just quit wasting time, and lobotomize everyone. Oh...wait, that procedure only had a 30% success rate.

Eleven replies so far......no one has anything positive to say about compulsory
mental health screening of all children.......plus pregnant women.....plus adults
who work in public schools. According to this link, <a href="http://www.illinoisleader.com/news/newsview.asp?c=17748">http://www.illinoisleader.com/news/newsview.asp?c=17748</a>
Illinois has already implemented this progtam.

Ustwo......as I recall, you live in Illinois. I am surprised that you have not weighed in on this thread....yet.

In edit.......Ustwo beat me to the punch, while I was writing this. At last,
support for this program....or is he being sarcastic ?

maybe i should be clearer--the problem is in how the categories woul dbe defined that informed the screening. given that, like i said above, i do not see much in the way of calirty on this matter in programs already underway in the schools, and i see nothing in the above that talks about defining the categories tightly, i assume that they would piggyback on existing institutional logic--and therein lies the main problem.

After reading about this, I have another reason to move out of Illinois, except that the screening will probably be in every state before too long. This is a seriously bad idea. Public schools have a bad enough track record measuring academic achievment with standardized testing. The theme here is laziness. Schools will take the easy way out and just drug any kids they deem fit to instead of trying to understand the differences and variations in student behavior. I believe psychotropic drugs should be used as a weapon of last resort against mental illness. Most of them are not even proven to be effective against the disorders they are prescribed to treat. I predict the mental health questions will be peppered with items relating to students behaving the way the system wants them to behave and having nothing at all to do with the mental well being of the students. No good is going to come of this at all.

What puzzles me is that schools are already low on funds, where has all this money come from all of a sudden? Couldn't it be used for something better? Like providing things like books, paper and chalk?

I would agree that ADD/ADHD is the most overdiagnosed ailment in the country, but I can tell you from first-hand experience, it does exist, medication does help if you're willing to give it some effort (they aid you, they're not miracle drugs,) and you can partially grow out of it as you mature and your brain finishes wiring itself.

That's the beauty of the system, my friend!

Once mental health screenings become compulsory the sky's the limit. We simply say that every child has a "problem" and drug them appropriately. Can't find a problem? Say they have ADHD, that's easy enough to "diagnose." Fuck the kids who have real problems, fuck actually dealing with those problems and fuck the non-pharmacological solution. There's no money there, neighbor. We can just drug up every kid in America with with "solutions" that mask the symptoms so it looks like they're actually working, collect parental accolades (along with their money....) and sit back and wait for the profits to roll in.

Once the plan is in effect, we'll actually be saving the educational system money. No need for books, paper, chalk or qualified teachers to educate our children as they will all be sitting in a mind numbing haze. In fact with enough "screenings" we could probably cut out everything but the four walls, floor, ceiling and maybe some sort of guard to make sure the kids get their medication. Imagine the savings!

They make it all sound so reasonable, as if some wise doctor will be handling your care. There is already a massive problem with patented (read more-expensive) drugs that are nominally or less efficacious than generics being sold in ads to the public and physicians that this just seems like an evil extension. Can't put my finger on it right now but there is some interesting information on who mostly pays for drug development( suprise: you do, through your government) and drug companies use the expense(yours) to justify the high cost of drugs.

2 Things jump out at me on this:

1) I wonder if this is another reason to limit lawsuits against doctors and medicorps. After all a misdiagnosis or overmedicating a child or medicating with a drug that the USDA passed thru without much research and wham bam it starts causing serious childhood chronic health problems. Limit liability raise the prescription rate.

2) I wonder if it will remain all kids or just "kids in public schools or recieving public monies (which could be those nice little $500 "tax refund"checks that Bush send out to families. He can claim tax rebate, but remember as with corporate America if you take federal aid (and a rebate is aid in a way) the government then OWNS you.) Therefore only the lower classes are susceptible to this and it hopefully takes away the desire and awareness to argue for government fiscal responsibility and class envy.

It would be interesting to hear what exactly will constitute mental illness or deviant behavior. I´m afraid I would probably get drugged or interned immediately. As would probably a good percentage of you dangerously informed thought criminals.