Organized psychiatry and major pharmaceutical companies, with the help and blessing of the Bush administration, are busy turning America's future generations into drug-addicts with shattered self-images and life-long labels as mentally defective. If they can survive the common psychiatric drug side-effects of suicide, some may live long enough to recover their lives through drug detox and drug rehab programs.
The criminal assault on children in the name of profit began in earnest when the psychiatric-pharmaceutical lobbies pushed the Bush government into recommending the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC) in 2003, which, among a host of changes to the mental health system, adopted universal mental illness screening and prescribing of psych drugs where allegedly needed for all Americans from the age of zero up to the oldest living citizen. This just adds to the problem of 22 million Americans already needing drug rehab.
The most controversial recommendation is screening school children in all 50 states under the TeenScreen program, and the adoption in many states of programs like the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), a treatment plan that orders the use of new, expensive and mostly untested psychiatric drugs on all kids "diagnosed" with mental disorders - but only on kids who's families are covered by public health care programs such as Medicaid. In other words, if they can pay, they gotta play. It's doubtful Medicaid will cover the drug rehab they need later.
The result has been massive, forced and wholesale drugging of millions of children across the country with addictive and dangerous drugs, all but one of which have never received FDA approvals for use on children. Only one - Prozac - has ever scraped through an FDA approval for kids, but it's been associated with destructive behavior since the 1980s. This cannot help but mean that millions of young people actually require drug rehab to achieve a normal life. But the label of mental illness cannot be erased - it will stick forever.
TeenScreen is not free, either. It's costing tax payers a big bundle. On November 17, 2004, the University of South Florida announced the receipt of a grant of $98,641 from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to expand the TeenScreen program in the Tampa Bay area. Florida Medicaid is also being hijacked. The St. Petersburg Times reported earlier this year that, in the last 7 years, the cost to taxpayers for psych drugs prescribed to kids soared nearly 500%, and cost Medicaid $1,800 per child in 2006. Of course, the program isn't paying for all the drug detox and drug rehab programs for those who wake up and try to escape the psych-drug collar and leash.
Drug detox for a whole rainbow of drugs?
It's well documented that both TMAP and TeenScreen have been heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And the list of drugs being pushed on kids are enough to give a drug detox or drug rehab counselor a migraine. Kids are being force-fed new generations of SSRI antidepressant drugs including Prozac and Cymbalta by Eli Lilly; Paxil marketed by GlaxoSmithKline; Zoloft by Pfizer; Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Laboratories; Effexor by Wyeth, as well as generic versions sold by Barr Pharmaceuticals, Ranbaxy Labs and Genpharm. New atypical antipsychotics include Zyprexa by Eli Lilly; Risperdal marketed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subdivision of Johnson & Johnson; Abilify by Bristol-Myers Squibb; Clozaril sold by Novartis, and Geodon by Pfizer.
Dr Fred Baughman, a recognized authority on psychotropic drugs, says that psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry "married and launched the joint market strategy of calling all emotional and behavioral problems 'brain diseases', due to 'chemical imbalances', needing 'chemical balancers.' He calls the use of the chemical imbalance theory the "biggest health care fraud and mass character assassination" in human history, and says it must be abolished. There is no scientific basis for what is merely a theory, but that doesn't take away from the need for drug detox and often drug rehab after being exposed to these drugs for any length of time.
What's worse, many of the drugs are statistically associated with suicidal behavior in children, and parents are not receiving full disclosure of the risks. If your kids or the kids of a friend are being "TeenScreened" and prescribed psychiatric drugs, call a drug rehab program counselor right away to see if drug detox and rehab are needed.
Rod MacTaggart is a freelance writer who contributes articles on health.
