Excerpted from HPISB – September 30, 2004

"A nationwide initiative has been quietly in the making since 2002. Conceived in Texas, apparently with President George W. Bush’s enthusiastic blessing, there are now some 27 sites around the country piloting various parts of it. Nationally, however, the proposed legislation earned barely a blip on the radar screen – the project is so hush-hush that two officials were sacked for speaking to the press about it – until mid-July, when the House Appropriations Committee approved $20 million in new federal monies to begin nationwide implementation."

"The New Freedom Initiative is a plan to screen the entire U.S. population for mental illness and to provide a cradle-to-grave continuum of services for those identified as either mentally ill or at risk of becoming so. Under the plan, schools would become hubs of the screening process – not only for children but for their parents and teachers. There are even components aimed at senior citizens, pregnant women, and new mothers.

"In April 2002, President Bush established the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health to conduct a ‘comprehensive study of the United States mental health service delivery system.’ The commission issued its recommendations in July 2003, chief among them being that schools are in a ‘key position’ to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at educational facilities."

"The precursor endeavor, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), was a trial balloon, not a pilot program. This means a start-up venture (usually confined to one town or state) to assess the amount and type of resistance to an idea. TMAP started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas, and the mental-health and corrections systems of Texas. Recently, the New Freedom Commission designated TMAP a ‘model’ medication-treatment plan, whereupon President Bush instructed more than 25 federal agencies to develop a nationwide ‘implementation plan.’ "

"TMAP was funded through a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant – and several drug companies that stand to gain billions of dollars. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the philanthropic (read: p.r.) arm of the Johnson & Johnson medical-supply/household-products empire and a major player in promoting controversial prevention curricula in schools. …

"At a time when Congress and the FDA are questioning the role of many antidepressants in suicide and violent aggression, legislation that would target even more children and adults for unproved, radical psychotropic-drug therapies is highly suspect."

"Take, for example, Olanzapine (trade name Zyprexa), one of the newer antipsychotic drugs recommended in the Texas plan. It is Eli Lilly’s top seller. A 2003 New York Times article by Gardiner Harris reported that 70 percent of Olanzapine sales already are paid for by government agencies, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

"Eli Lilly has multiple ties to the Bush administration. George Bush, Sr., was a member of Lilly’s board of directors. Lilly made $1.6 million in political contributions in 2000 – 82 percent of which went to George W. Bush and the Republican Party. President Bush appointed Lilly’s chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, to a seat on the Homeland Security Council."

"During his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush boasted of his support for Texas’ TMAP project, without saying exactly how it worked or the role he envisioned for it nationally. Instead, he bragged that the legislation he passed expanded Medicaid coverage of psychotropic drugs. …"

"[S]tigma will, in fact, be heightened as the hapless young ‘patient’ moves into the workforce and the nursing home. He will be permanently classified as ‘at risk’ and tracked for a lifetime by government agencies. …"

"Special interests as well as various social-service agencies and universities all pitch ‘prevention’ programs (many of them quasipolitical, such as those on AIDS awareness) to federal agencies in an effort to get tell-all polls into America’s classrooms. Most are ‘What would you do if …?’ questionnaires and self-reports that focus on sex, race, depression, drugs, and parents. These surveys are followed by a smorgasbord of non-academic programs. The rationale is that it is in the best interests of the child and society to ‘[create] a State-level structure for school-based mental health services to provide consistent State-level leadership and collaboration between education, general health, and mental health systems.’ "

"The enabling vehicle for the New Freedom Initiative is the No Child Left Behind Act, ostensibly to ‘fulfill the promise of NCLB … by remov[ing] the emotional, behavioral, and academic barriers that interfere with student success in school.’ …

"The commission seeks not only to assess youngsters but ‘to expand school mental health programs and evaluate parents’ – through Parts B and C of IDEA. …

" ‘Treating parents’ means psychotherapy and drugs, and the initiative calls for a mandate to provide ‘social and emotional check-ups’ in all primary healthcare facilities. This means parents are supposed to be surreptitiously assessed for mental ‘illness’ every time they walk into their physician’s office."

"Have policymakers learned nothing from the holocaust, the old Soviet Union’s ‘psychiatric hospitals,’ or, more recently, South Africa’s so-called ‘mental institutions,’ where political dissidents were routinely ‘re-educated’ and/or tortured? …

"In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness." Source: B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, October 2004, pp. 28-29.

"On Sept. 9, the ‘Ron Paul Amendment’ was defeated in the House of Representatives by a vote of 95-315. The Amendment would have prevented the funds sought by an appropriations bill (HR 5006) from being used for the mandatory mental-health screening of Americans, including public schoolchildren."

"Prior to the House vote, [Congressman] Paul had vehemently denounced mandatory mental-health screening in a letter to fellow congressmen. Paul wrote, ‘[P]sychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children’s typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs. Yet some parents have even been charged with child abuse for refusing to drug their children. The federal government should not promote national mental-health screening programs that will force the use of these psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin.’

"The idea of nationally screening school children for mental health stems from the establishment of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in 2002. Its mission is to ‘promote successful community integration for adults with a serious mental illness and children with a serious emotional disturbance.’ …

"[A]s WorldNetDaily reports, the commission’s panel ‘recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children … Schools, the panel concluded, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.’

"The public schools would address ‘the mental health needs of youth in the education system’ through ‘prevention, early identification, early intervention, and treatment.’ How early? …

"The bill has moved onto the Senate, where it will be heard before the end of the year." Source: Wendy McElroy, LewRockwell.com, 9/16/04

Excerpted from HPISB – September 15, 2004

“The American tradition of parents deciding what is best for their children is, yet again, under attack. The pharmaceutical industry has convinced President Bush to support mandatory mental-health screening for every child in America, including preschool children, and the industry is now working to convince Congress as well. But mandatory screening alone is not what the pharmaceutical industry wants. The real payoff for the drug companies is the forced drugging of children that will result - as we learned tragically with Ritalin - even when parents refuse.”

“Congressman Ron Paul, an OB/GYN physician for over 30 years, is desperately trying to keep the drug companies, politicians and federal bureaucrats from becoming parents to your children. Dr. Paul will introduce on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning (whenever the floor schedule allows) an amendment to the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Act for FY 2005 that will withhold funds for this new federal mental-health-screening program. He will urge his congressional colleagues to support his effort in a letter to be distributed tomorrow morning.

“Dr. Paul’s letters says in part: ‘As you know, psychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children’s typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs. Yet some parents have even been charged with child abuse for refusing to drug their children. The federal government should not promote national mental health screening programs that will force the use of these psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin.’ ”

“If you think this action alert is about something that ‘can’t happen here,’ think again. In 1995, the state of Texas launched the Texas Medication Algorithm Project. (WorldNetDaily.com, June 21, 2004)

“The state of Illinois has also approved a mental health screening program. The Illinois legislature passed the Children’s Mental Health Act of 2003 which will provide screening for ‘all children ages 0-18’ and ‘ensure appropriate and culturally relevant assessment of your children’s social and emotional development with the use of standardized tools.’ In addition, all pregnant women in Illinois are to be screened for depression.”

“Dr. Karen R. Effrem, another physician and leading opponent of mandatory screening recently stated, ‘Universal mental health screening and the drugging of children, as recommended by the New Freedom Commission [presidential commission], needs to be stopped so that many thousands if not millions of children will be saved from receiving stigmatizing diagnoses that would follow them for the rest of their lives. America’s school children should not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous medications based on vague and dubious diagnoses.’

“Dr. Effrem warns of the following: 1. Parental rights are unclear or non-existent under these screening programs. 2. Parents are already being coerced to put their children on psychiatric medications and some children are dying because of it. 3. Mental health screening does not prevent suicide. 4. Mental health diagnoses are ‘subjective’ and ‘social constructions’ as admitted by the authors of the diagnostic manuals themselves. 5. Most psychiatric medications do not work in children. 6. The side effects of these medications in children are severe. 7. The untoward influence by the pharmaceutical industry, or at least the impropriety, is abundantly clear in two important aspects of this issue.”

“8. Merging screening with the academic standards required by No Child Left Behind, as is happening in Illinois, will lead to diagnosis for political reasons. School mental health and violence prevention programs funded by NCLB and government counterterrorism operations are already using such criteria as ‘homophobia’ and ‘defenders of the US Constitution against federal government and the UN’ to label school children and US citizens as mentally unstable and violent. …”

THANKS TO BUSH COMMISSION, PSYCHOPOLITICS COULD ENSNARE ADULT CITIZENS
PSYCHOPOLITICS - the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through "mental healing."

“One last note … if mental-health screening for every American child isn’t bad enough, how about mandatory mental-health screening for every American adult? Yes, that’s coming too. The final report of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health states, ‘Both children and adults will be screened for mental illnesses during their routine physical exams.’ ” Source: Kent Snyder, The Liberty Committee, www.thelibertycommittee.org, 9/7/04