Research Links
For more information see these sites
Favorite Sites
Procedure on Young Children
Step One
TeenScreen lures kids as young as 9 years old into doing the suicide survey by offering them free movie passes, food coupons, "I completed TeenScreen" stress balls and pizza parties, if they consent to the procedure.
One tactic TeenScreen officials use is to sell the child on the suicide survey first and after they have the child's agreement, they later contact parents.
TeenScreen Project Coordinator, Kathleen Cigich, was quoted as saying: "We found early on, though, that sending out letters directly to parents is prohibitively time consuming and gets a low response rate. We thought, why not go to students themselves and offer a video store coupon to anyone who brings back a parental consent form within a two-day turnaround period. It works. Our response rate is extremely high."
TeenScreen also utilizes a "passive consent" form which requires no written parental approval. The passive consent form is sent home to parents and if they don't return it TeenScreen considers that the parents approve. TeenScreen officials favor passive consent because they say it boosts their chances of screening kids to 95% as opposed to the written parental consent technique. What if the child forgets to bring the consent form home? What happens if the parent is too busy to refuse in writing? They've consented in the eyes of TeenScreen personnel. ...
Our purpose in putting together this web site is to provide the truth on mental health screening programs by presenting information gathered from various sources on the Internet and helping you to connect-the-dots.
The widespread practice of labeling children as "mentally ill" and drugging them with potent, mind-altering psychiatric drugs is affecting our future and our children's future. With the data provided here, loving parents and concerned citizens will be able to prevail inspite of the enormous pressure to think that psychiatrists and "mental health experts" know better on how to care for our children than we do. Armed with the truth we can spare our children a drug-numbing childhood and a label that will follow them into a drug-consuming adulthood.
Maybe my expectations are too high. All of my life I've put a lot of stock in a story if I read it in the New York Times. In hindsight, I must admit that I found the whole saga of the planted WMD stories, that in large part helped the administration push the country into an unnecessary and senseless war in Iraq, troubling to say the least. However, to its credit the Times did give Judith Miller the boot and thus, restored my confidence in the legitimacy of the paper at least somewhat.
TeenScreen, a program to screen America's school children for "mental illness" to be treated with often addictive drugs prescribed by a pharma-driven treatment algorithm, is making waves. The parents of a girl who was given a questionaire and subsequently diagnosed with obsessive compulsive and social anxiety disorder are up in arms about the testing and say they will take all legal remedies available to them.
PART 1 of 2
By Lynn Stuter
December 24, 2005
NewsWithViews.com
A spate of articles have appeared recently in newspapers across the country focusing on youth suicide. Included in the majority of those articles is mention of TeenScreen, a program emanating from Columbia University. TeenScreen brags, on their website, of their presence in all but a few of the fifty states (Alabama, Kansas, Maryland, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming).
...
We can find the answer in the cover letter of the Presidents New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC). It is of interest to note, at this point, that Michael Hogan who headed the Presidents New Freedom Commission on Mental Health is also on the advisory council of TeenScreen. Are we to believe that Hogan’s position as head of the New Freedom Commission is not connected to the recognition TeenScreen received in the NFC report; and the benefit TeenScreen will obviously incur as a result of that recognition?
The cover letter to the NFC report, signed by Michael Hogan, states,
“You charged the Commission to study the mental health service delivery system, and to make recommendations that would enable adults with serious mental illnesses and children with serious emotional disturbance to live, work, learn, and participate fully in their communities. We have completed the task.”
The created crisis: children with serious emotional disturbance must be able to live, work, learn, and participate fully in their communities. Of course, while that sounds wonderful, the proof is in the pudding so to speak and what we have found, repeatedly, with the transformation of any system, is that the system is not about helping those caught in it, but rather, is about meeting its goals (exit outcomes). In this capacity, the people caught in the system become nothing more than fodder in a grist mill with accountability being to the system, not to the people.
Quite obviously, the crisis having been created, TeenScreen is there to save the day and certainly reap the profit. After claiming the TeenScreen program to be based on research, one newspaper, The St Louis Post-Dispatch, actually printed a retraction, stating,
“The TeenScreen program was developed by Columbia University in 1991. Its creator said it was based on studies of teens who had committed suicide. The program is not based on more recent research involving brain imaging, as was suggested in a report on the front page of Sunday's editions.” (posted December 13, 2005)
Too much of what is being passed off as research today, quoted liberally and incessantly and supported by so-called experts, meets the adage that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth.
...
TEEN-SCREEN AND THE CREATED CRISIS
PART 2 of 2
By Lynn Stuter
December 24, 2005
NewsWithViews.com
A document coming out of the Richland School District in Washington State a few years back contained bar codes that could be scanned for both children’s names and “observable behaviors.” These bar codes, part of the Learner Profile, were accessed using a forerunner to the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) — a hand-held portable device on which information can be entered, stored, and transferred to a computer. In the advertisement for the hardware and software, it is stated:
“using … a list of observables you can create, you can instantly record observations anywhere … in the classroom, lab, shop, basketball court — even on a field trip. At the end of the day, your observations can be electronically transferred to your computer.”
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to figure out the “observables” that would be created by a school psychologist, counselor or social worker. Take that one step further and imagine the “observables” that could be created by an over-zealous school psychologist, counselor or social worker after being exposed to the TeenScreen screening form where the criteria for the various supposed disorders associated with suicide are listed. In an article published by The New York Times, the paper — referring to the work of the founder of TeenScreen, David Shafer, now chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University — stated,
TeenScreen - Another Gross Distortion
Here's another gross distortion of the truth by TeenScreen. On its web site, in response to the question, is TeenScreen related to TMAP, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project? It says: “No. ... Some Web postings inappropriately and inaccurately claim that TeenScreen is a bridge to medication and hence the TMAP program. This is entirely false.”
“There is absolutely no relationship between TeenScreen and TMAP. ... TeenScreen does not endorse any particularly mental health treatment or medication.”
"TMAP ... is a medication formulary for seriously mentally ill adults in Texas. The adults served by this program are cared for in public programs. TeenScreen and TMAP have nothing to do with one another."
That's what TeenScreen says. Now lets look at the truth.
Simply put, a TMAP (aka, algorithm) is a list of drugs that doctors are required to use in treating persons with specific illnesses who receive medication funded by the government with tax dollars.
Contrary to what TeenScreen claims, this list is not limited to mentally ill adults in Texas. In fact, Texas has a children's version that apes the adult version and is used for kids in hospitals, foster care institutions, prisons, juvenile programs and every other public program that is funded with tax dollars in Texas.
It all started in the mid-90s while Bush was governor. TMAP was developed by what's referred to as an "expert consensus" made up of a group of "experts" already known to have favorable opinions of certain drugs, chosen by drug company sponsors, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Novartis, Janssen-Ortho-McNeil, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Wyeth-Ayerst and Forrest Laboratories.