TeenScreen - Stealing Our Children's Future

You create "disorders" and catalogue them in authoritative tomes that no one would dare question. You heavily promote these vague "disorders" or "mental illnesses," whose symptoms are general enough to encompass almost anyone at any time. You then offer dangerous drugs as the solution to these "mental disorders". You downplay the host of terrible side effects attendant to these drugs, up to and including death, according to the latest FDA warnings. You hide the fact that the drugs will destroy the children's spontaneity, decisiveness, and their right to experience life unfettered by chemical constraints.

With the creation of unfounded, unproven disorders you would have eliminated the trail of accountability and opened the doors to all manner of subjective evaluation, speculation and outright hypocrisy. It is then easy to create panic - "look what might happen to your child if you don't take action. He or she could be learning disabled, never have a normal life, commit suicide, harm others etc. If you don't put him on mind-altering, deadly drugs, he'll certainly turn to street drugs."

You would then assume an air of authority and respectability unearned, but most times unquestioned to carry out your seemingly humanitarian tasks, claiming fraudulently that you alone understand the intricate workings of the mind.

Sound like a plot out of a science fiction or political conspiracy novel? Look around. This is real. It is happening in our society at this time in broad view, publicized, promoted, heavily funded and backed by one of the largest lobbying forces on capital hill. It is the psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel intent on drugging our entire nation for profit, starting with our children. The latest foray into our society is the insidious TeenScreen, a suicide screening program, put forth as a solution to save our younger generation from what psychiatry is promoting as an epidemic of teen suicides.

However, TeenScreen lies. There is no epidemic. In actuality, in my state, Florida, there have been a total of 250 child and teen suicides in the last 5 years. That's an average of 50 a year out of millions of young people. Each one is a tragedy but this is hardly an epidemic.

What the psychiatric community has also failed to mention was that a majority of those 250 who committed suicide had received psychiatric treatment, with most of them on one or more psychiatric drugs. Some of these drugs carry black warning labels from the FDA stating that they can cause violence and suicide in young people. If psychiatry failed those young people and maybe even contributed to their death, why would we deliver more children into their clutches?

TeenScreen, no matter their claims, is just part of a machine intent on feeding our children, through the schools, into the giant psychiatric pharmaceutical system, from which many will never escape.

After your child answers the personal and decidedly invasive questionnaire about themselves and your family, that is TeenScreen, the next step on their journey is the interpretation of that questionnaire by a "mental health expert" who, more often that not, is able to identify a "real risk", which has somehow escaped that child's well-meaning parents.

Oh my God, my Bobby or Jenny at risk of possible suicide? What kind of a parent would I be not to act on this news? I should take them to an expert!

Of course, this is just psychiatric subjectivity. There is no trail of evidence, no science, no medical testing and no proof as to what might be wrong with your child. But they are the experts! And they are concerned about your children to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year! Perhaps that is why the only deference the psychiatric community has ever made to real medicine or actual medical tests comes in their official disclaimer that "it might be a chemical imbalance in the brain." Of course, there are no tests to determine a biochemical imbalance in the brain of a living individual. And contrary to what the psychiatric community would have us believe, real, lasting happiness does not come in a pill at the cost of real and workable solutions.

So now, like the emperor with no clothes, TeenScreen and its minions are roiling the cauldrons of fear, flaunting their authority and parading their duplicitous cures before an unsuspecting nation.

And we, like the little boy who questioned why the emperor wore no clothes, need to question TeenScreen, loudly and emphatically, and make our views known to the lawmakers and anyone who will listen. Parents must not sit idly by while schools are turned into pharmaceutical clearing houses. We must not tolerate the disabling of an entire generation of our children by turning them into human guinea pigs, to satisfy the egos of psychiatric charlatans and line the pockets of drug czars.

AUTHOR BIO:
Jeanyne Wanner is a freelance writer and activist living in Florida