Sunday, November 12, 2006

Parent Alert! TeenScreen Entrapping Students

This Wikipedia page references numerous sites that are warning parents and concerned citizens that the NCLB program is allowing drug companies and their surrogates to entrap teens into taking a "test" that will identify the child as needing medication.

From Wikipedia;

TeenScreen is a national mental health and suicide risk screening program for students and adolescents. The screening itself generally consists of a short (usually around ten minutes) questionnaire [1] and is conducted in public and private schools, doctor's offices, clinics, youth groups, shelters, and other youth-serving organizations and settings.[2]


Sites such as TeenScreenTruth warn:
One of the things TeenScreen fails to openly disclose is that the percent of false-positives for their pencil and paper screening "tool" - called the Columbia Suicide Screen (CSS) - is 84%, which means that the chances of your child walking away falsely labeled as "suicidal" or "mentally ill" is 84%!

Furthermore:
Strong evidence suggests that the intended treatment for those so labeled is psychiatric drugging, using antidepressants and mood-altering drugs such as Ritalin, Xanax, Celexa, Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Thorazine, Luvox and other similar drugs which are known by the FDA (and the pharmaceutical companies) to cause depression, violence, suicide and homicide. In a recent survey of child psychiatrists it was discovered that 9 out of 10 children in their care were on at least one of these or similar drugs. Despite the recent FDA "black box" warnings, it is not unusual for a child to be put on two or more psychotropic antidepressant drugs — drugs that the FDA says can trigger suicidal thoughts.


This is the first I've heard of this program so I'm sure we'll be returning to the subject. In the meantime, ask questions.

Why? TeenScreenFacts claims kids are being lured into taking these tests without parental notification.

Someone in your school may ask you to participate in a program called "TeenScreen". They might even tell you that if you agree to take the test and take a form home to your parents to sign they'll give you a movie or a pizza coupon. Don't be fooled. Because that free pizza or movie pass could easily lead to someone deciding you have a mental disorder and need to be on psychiatric drugs -- all based on how you answer some pretty stupid questions.

TeenScreen is a 10 minute mental health screening test that ends up in kids being labeled, diagnosed with a mental illness and put on psychiatric drugs. When it was done in Colorado , 71% of the kids who took the test were told they had a mental disorder.

Once a teen is told that he has a mental disorder, which is decided by how he answers their questions, his parents are called and told that their kid needs treatment. In other words, drugs.

Out of the last thirteen school shooters, nine of them were taking these drugs. And those are just the ones we know about -- the others were most likely on these drugs as well. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just last year said that psychiatric drugs can actually cause kids including teens to kill themselves.

It's possible that if the parents refuse to give the drug to their kid, the TeenScreen people will try to have him taken away from his home by the child welfare agencies to force him to take drugs.

Just as bad, if the TeenScreen people decide after looking at the result of the test that the teen will hurt himself or hurt other people (like you could even know that from reading a stupid test) they might call the police to come and arrest the teen.

TeenScreen is nothing more than a front group for psychiatrists and drug companies to make money off of you.

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