All of you are about to be screened for "mental health" and put on drugs

JackRiddler

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Wed Jul-28-04 08:20 PM
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All of you are about to be screened for "mental health" and put on drugs

Those who have seen the barbed-wire "free speech zone" in Boston may wonder how to top this in terms of fascist implications. Actually, this already happened last month and went largely unnoticed.

The drug companies backing Bush were invited some time ago into a commission on mental health, the "New Freedom Initiative." In its June report the panel recommends screening EVERYONE in the United States - starting with the captive market of 52 million pupils and 6 million teachers - for mental illness. Everyone diagnosed with something - and pretty much everyone will be - will receive a prescription regimen based on a "treatment algorithm" (hey, that's scientific) devised by the participating drug companies.

Unfortunately, the Orwellian moments are only going to come thicker. The thrust to the New Feudalism, Corporate Totalitarianism, New World Order, or whatever you like to call it is out in the open and will not slow down unless we arise as a people to end it. This is not the time for those of us who saw all this on 9/11, in 1980, 1969 or much earlier to be enraged. (Brave New World was published in 1928.) We must keep trying to wake up the sleeping majority with articles like the following from BMJ (British Medical Journal).

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7454/1458

BMJ 2004;328:1458 (19 June)

Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness
Jeanne Lenzer

New York

A sweeping mental health initiative will be unveiled by President George W Bush in July. The plan promises to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," according to a March 2004 progress report entitled New Freedom Initiative (www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/newfreedom/toc-2004.html). While some praise the plan's goals, others say it protects the profits of drug companies at the expense of the public.

Bush established the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in April 2002 to conduct a "comprehensive study of the United States mental health service delivery system." The commission issued its recommendations in July 2003. Bush instructed more than 25 federal agencies to develop an implementation plan based on those recommendations.

The president's commission found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children. According to the commission, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviours and emotional disorders." Schools, wrote the commission, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.

The commission also recommended "Linkage with treatment and supports" including "state-of-the-art treatments" using "specific medications for specific conditions." The commission commended the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) as a "model" medication treatment plan that "illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes."

(snip)

Mr Jones told the BMJ that the same "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that generated the Texas project was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which, according to his whistleblower report, were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab" (http://psychrights.org/Drugs/AllenJonesTMAPJanuary20.pdf).

Larry D Sasich, research associate with Public Citizen in Washington, DC, told the BMJ that studies in both the United States and Great Britain suggest that "using the older drugs first makes sense. There's nothing in the labeling of the newer atypical antipsychotic drugs that suggests they are superior in efficacy to haloperidol . There has to be an enormous amount of unnecessary expenditures for the newer drugs."

Drug companies have contributed three times more to the campaign of George Bush, seen here campaigning in Florida, than to that of his rival John Kerry

(snip)

The commission's recommendation for increased screening has also been questioned. Robert Whitaker, journalist and author of Mad in America, says that while increased screening "may seem defensible," it could also be seen as "fishing for customers," and that exorbitant spending on new drugs "robs from other forms of care such as job training and shelter programmes."

But Dr Graham Emslie, who helped develop the Texas project, defends screening: "There are good data showing that if you identify kids at an earlier age who are aggressive, you can intervene... and change their trajectory."

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7454/1458

How appropriate that another item in Capitol Hill Blue today claims to have discovered that Bush is on serious medication himself:
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_4921.shtml

The "New Freedom Initiative" report itself is available at www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/newfreedom/toc-2004.html

The disturbing part is that Bush is but the handmaiden of the drug companies (some based in Texas) represented in the "New Freedom Initiative." They are powerful and have been around forever.

The movement to get all Americans and ultimately everyone in the world docile and pliant on prescription drugs is much broader than Bush, and in fact puts on a primarily "liberal" front. Do you imagine Kerry will distance himself from it? It combines false humanitarianism (we want to help these poor aggressive children have a better life!) with false traditionalism (restore order to the classroom!) for a bipartisan consensus in favor of good business (sell more pills!).

The drug companies are among the three "industries of enforced profit" that have dominated the development of late capitalism, meaning Guns (covering the industries of arms, the military, surveillance, intel, security and geostrategy), Oil (energy cartels generally) and Drugs (legal and illegal, both driven by the state).

Cheney may be Halliburton but Rumsfeld is Searle: a company that turns oil into little pills and gets you to swallow them.