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Stop TeenScreen

February 24, 2007 permalink

Promoters of a program called TeenScreen want to examine every American teenager for signs of mental illness. Teens failing the tests will be referred to a psychiatrist, and prescribed psychotropic drugs.

You can find an account of the whole process on the website TeenScreen Truth. An alliance between the psychiatric profession and the drug industry pushes the drugs and divides the spoils. Force and deception assist at every stage. Parents are required to consent, but that consent is obtained by mailing out a letter. If the parent does not respond, it is deemed to be consent. The child must sign another consent form, but instructions tell the clinicians to treat non-consent as failing the test. After a prescription is issued the child protection system acts as enforcers by treating non-compliance with prescriptions as medical neglect.

The actual questionnaires used are confidential, but copies have made their way into cyberspace. For example, here is the self-administered questionnaire used by Columbia University (pdf). You can find more forms, including those used to evaluate the results, at Liberty Coalition. Subjects failing the self-administered test get another questionnaire administered by a professional. One of the questions is: "In the last year, have you used marijuana six or more times?". The instructions tell the clinician to expect "yes"; a "no" is an indicator of untruthfulness.

If successful in the US, this program is likely to spread to Canada. You have an opportunity to help stop this program in its early stages with an online petition. Many petitions relating to family law attract dozens or hundreds of signatures, but the TeenScreen petition is approaching twenty thousand signatures. We hope to see some Dufferin VOCA readers on the list.

Addendum: In the two days following this article there was a spurt of signatures on the petition, including several known Dufferin VOCA readers.

Pharma/Shrinks

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