Universal Mental Health -- Now Screening At A Pre-School Near You (Kathlyn

[Tace]

(This is DU's own Katinmin)

Kathlyn Stone -- World News Trust

Oct. 6, 2006 -- Just how comfortable are parents having their children, from pre-schoolers through high school, screened for mental illness? How will they respond when, if their child is diagnosed with a mental disorder, he or she is prescribed psychotherapeutic drugs?

In Indiana, parents of a 15-year-old are suing the school for screening their daughter without their consent.

High school mental health screening has already taken root in many Minnesota schools. Forest Lake , Cloquet, Lakeville and some St. Paul schools have adopted “Teen Screen,” a suicide prevention screening program supported by grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Sample questions at the end of the article). Under passive consent, parents must opt-out of the screening. But first they need to be aware of the programs. Opponents of the screening say the screening surveys are invasive and unscientific.

Minnesota schools have been screening pre-schoolers as “a requirement” for entering kindergarten since 2005-2006, but parents are not legally bound to complete the screening. Federal programs aim to extend the screening to include children at birth to age five.

Mandatory mental health screening, inching ever forward to full national implementation, is one of those rare issues that is finding vociferous opposition among civil libertarians, conservative and liberal groups alike.

more

http://www.worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=298

[pooja]

1. How many more 5 yr olds do we need on ritalin

[Deja Q]

3. How many more uneducated doctors do we need?

I've dealt with many throughout my life and only THREE I would consider competent.

The rest are either mentally deficient (ironic) or incapable of doing anything other than by-the-book and ignoring facets of one's life in order to make a 'prognosis'. Either way, it's incompetence. NO field can be ran "by the book" or reading a flippin' cue card. Intelligence and drive and ability and needed too. Too many people forget that.

[Tace]

18. I'm Cynical About Medical Doctors

I take a minimalist approach. The less, the better.

[mdmc]

2. kick r

:yourock:

[electron_blue]

4. huh, funny thing is my child just started K in Minn and there was no

screening.

I see this as potentially a good thing, esp with regards to suicide prevention. As it is, I'm sure that if a teacher suspected a student of being suicidal, they would be likely to at least try to let the parents know. Screening is already in place for eyes and ears, and in some place for too high/low bmi. It's not like the schools are giving drugs to the children, just trying to screen potential problems.

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. I agree

I am a teacher and the only place I have ever heard about this screening is here on DU. I am not naive enough to believe it is not happening at all, I am just saying I don't believe it is the HUGE problem some seem to think it is.

Another factor that is never mentioned is that under current laws, a school could NEVER do a screening like this without parental permission. And no way can they put a kid on drugs without parental consent. I also am very positive that schools would not want to do this, because if they did, they would have to pay for it. We can't afford the programs we have currently, so new ones are completely out of the question.

I do agree with you that suicide prevention is important.

[lostnfound]

8. Horrendous case in TX where mandatory screening led to forced confinement

of a teenage girl in a mental hospital where she was given many, many psychoactive drugs against wishes of her parents.


The girl in the story was guilty of "mouthing off" to a teacher too much, tagged as being depressive, and at age 12, put in a psychiatric hospital against her parents' wishes, who were not even allowed to visit or talk to her for five months, during which time she was given 12 different psychoactive drugs and put in restraints 25 times, before finally being released to her parents custody after 9 months.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3558881

[proud2BlibKansan]

10. Well I hope the parents sued

I also wonder about the source for that story.

[lostnfound]

12. The story was originally from Mother Jones magazine. (link)

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/medicating_aliah.html

[proud2BlibKansan]

15. And no one else printed this story

I know, I don't trust the MSM either. But this is what I do for a living and I am 100% positive that parents must give consent for any medical treatment. And please note that a screening is NOT treatment.

Everyone who takes good care of their kids would be amazed by the number of parents who don't.

I work with emotionally disturbed kids. A few years ago, I had a 9 year old who talked to the chalkboard. He would get up and start throwing things to make the monsters stop talking to him. His parents refused to get treatment for him. We hotlined it and the state child protective services agency refused to take the report because treatment for mental health issues is considered a parental choice. If he had been diabetic and his parents refused to give him insulin, the state would have intervened. But not for mental health issues.

So if we can't force parents to get treatment for obviously severely disturbed kids, do you really think we can force the treatment on the kids?

On edit, this is not the only time I have had a severely disturbed kid in class whose parents refused to get help. This is just one of the more tragic kids I have known.

[Tace]

19. The New York Times Did A Story On Her About A Year Ago

It was just as bad as you describe.

[katsy]

20. Passive permission?

The kind they slip into a newsletter and then tell you that if you do not want your child screened, sign this.

Anyway - this is a dangerous precident that must be stopped. The only beneficiaries are drug companies. And we trust them to do the right thing (not).



http://www.namiscc.org/News/2004/Fall/MentalHealthScreening.htm

[proud2BlibKansan]

23. It's not happening

And you can believe I will post a thread about it if I hear anything about it. The reality is that health care is a precious commodity and increasingly expensive. I honestly don't see this kind of massive screening as a possibility in the near future. Who is going to pay for it? In my state, they just kicked 100,000 off of Medicaid. It just isn't realistic to expect an expensive screening like this to be implemented.

[katsy]

24. Thanks proud2...

I'm every teachers nightmare.

Twice this year already - they slipped in these passive permissions.

Once, for the military (and my kids are 5 years old) and the other time to have them photographed for school publications.

I went ballistic and wrote a letter stating that the absence of my signature is not permission blah blah and cc'd it to my attorney and the dept of education.

My fear is that the cost will be absorbed by the pharmaceutical companies... who, in my mind are the new, improved drug pushers.

I do believe that community mental health projects are important. But they should be community driven (funded federally) with parents and professionals overseeing the project and tailoring it to the needs of their neighbors. Big pharma should not be pushing this.

[H2O Man]

6. There is

both a good and bad potential. There are good reasons for parents to have concerns about the over-use of drugs for "problemed" behaviors. The insurance and drug-dealing companies push the idea of using medications to an extent that I believe is criminal.

However, there are more and more children who can be identified and benefit from a wide range of mental health services. There are children who deal with numerous issues that range from biological to environmental, who can indeed benefit from these general screenings. It offers the school administration and faculty a useful way to address some of the problems that are common in classrooms today, many of which were rare when I was in school.

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. Kids also have more severe problems at much younger ages

But I will repeat - no treatment can be given without parent permission. I could fill a book with stories of kids who needed help and there was NOTHING the school could do because the parents refused to get help for the child. I have had kids in class who who were delusional - seeeing things and people who aren't there, hearing voices. But the parents chose not to treat an obvious mental illness. And we could do nothing, because you can't hotline medical neglect if it is a mental health problem. Sad.

[H2O Man]

17. Where I worked,

we used to coordinate a lot of services with the various school districts. I live in a rural, upstate New York county, and for many years, very few of the districts had a social worker in their system on most days. There was one psychologist who traveled around several counties. It was not adequate to meet the schools' needs.

Sevices are always best when everyone is involved. Sadly, some children do not have parents who willing and/or able to play a positive role in determining what their child needed; other parents assume the school is responsible for meeting all their child's needs from 8am to 3 pm. And I do not think that it is only the least qualified parents that have unrealistic expectations for teacher and school administrators.

I think the majority of children with serious "mental health" issues are dealing with issues other than the serious disorders involving psychosis. I agree there are more serious illnesses showing up much earlier, but there are times I've cringed when hearing reports. One was in TIME a few years ago; it involved issues of bipolar disorders in children and youth. One woman claimed she knew her child was bipolar before he was born. She was bipolar, and I think we could safely assume that her illness had an impact on her perception of a bipolar fetus. (I remember reading that part of the report in one of our weekly staff meetings, after a couple therapists had returned from a training about bipolar disorders in children & youth, and a significant increase in their identifying kids with this disorder.)

The psychologist in my daughters' district used to work in a program I ran, decades ago, when she was a college student. I have great respect for her and the rest of the staff in the school district, with very few exceptions. They deal with some children who come from terrible homes, and who really benefit from interventions. And it's not just the few kids who act out with anger and hostility, disrupting the class, swearing at teachers and bullying classmates. It's the quiet kid in the back row who suffers from anxiety as a result of parents who act out with anger and hostility at home, too.

My concern was that far too many children were given medication, and at times I felt that it was an attempt to make the unacceptable, acceptable. I can understand why some kids act out -- considering their home lives, I think it's better that they do. It's a plea for help.

We used to hotline medical neglect on parental noncompliance with mental health care. That is a strange bureaucratic system in and of itself.

[proud2BlibKansan]

21. You are lucky if your schools have social workers.

Most here do not. We didn't even have full time counselors in our schools until recently. And many of our schools don't have nurses. I write a letter to my state reps every year asking for legislation mandating counselors and nurses in every school. No luck yet.

[lostnfound]

14. It's quite frightening where this CAN lead..

Check out the story I linked to from Mother Jones magazine in post #12.

[sandnsea]

22. Mental health is way way way different

You can go to 5 different professionals and get 5 different diagnoses. The consequences of the wrong medication can be catastrophic. We can't test the nervous system enough to know the side affects these drugs can cause over the long term either. Diagnoses can also be very very biased. It's already proven in reported child neglect cases, poor women are reported way more often than wealthy women. This is a recipe for absolute disaster. I support more mental health in the schools, but these routine screenings are not the way to go about it at all.

[acmejack]

7. I have learned over the course of life.

In my dealings with Doctors, veterinarians, electricians and assorted tradespeople, and through working as a mechanic, technician and eventually, a field engineer, the repair of almost anything is usually relatively simple once it has been established what is wrong with it in the first place. It is making that determination that is often so nuanced as to be exceeding difficult. Talented diagnosticians are quite rare, no matter the field of endeavor.

The only commonality among them I have ever observed was a love of crossword puzzles, the best I have ever known seemed top share a fondness for them.

edit for spelling and to emend grammatical screwups...

[area51]

9. Even if this were a good idea...

... it's just another giveaway to Big Pharma.

"... he or she is prescribed psychotherapeutic drugs"

And who is going to pay for these drugs, since this barbaric country doesn't have universal healthcare? This is one more unfunded nazi mandate.

[lostnfound]

11. Pharmaceutical companies will surely lobby for increasing this, and the

GOP will go along with it.

As I mentioned in another post, a Texas girl was institutionalized against her parent's wishes and given dozens of psychoactive drugs..:;
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3558881

(originally from Mother Jones magazine, and a very eye-opening read)

[DaveJ]

16. Exactly!

It's about corporate greed. That is actually what is ruining this country right under our noses. Not even Republicans 50 years ago would have been stupid enough to let this happen.

The corporate takeover of America is insidious. They hire only the people who don't complain so the rest of us are less able to see it.

[undergroundpanther]

25. It's big phama

And Nami is funded by the big pharma as well.. they are the wannabe mental health consumer activists..But they are all for taking away the liberties of mentally ill people because they are uncomfortable.
Some articles:
http://www.mindfreedom.org/
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2004/06/23/bush_to_impose_psychiatric_drug_regime.htm
http://www.unknownnews.net/040712a-upits.html
http://www.unknownnews.net/050129d-28up.html

[katinmn]

26. Thanks for these links. I'm bookmarking these sites!

In 2004 and again in 2005 there were brief flurries of discussion about mandatory health screening but then it seemed to have fallen off the radar, but I kept wondering about it.

Recently I started calling people to see where things stood and found it is being insidiously implemented in different ways. There are many lobbyists working on state and national levels to get the pieces implemented in the schools. It is already happening in at least a dozen states. In my opinion, state legislators are being duped by pharma lobbyists that are hiding behind groups posing as patient and citizen advocates.

[tomreedtoon]

27. This is Standard American Educational Philosoply.

American elementary and secondary controls have nothing to do with education. They are there to process kids the way that McDonald's processes hamburgers, but unlike McDonald's there's no quality control, and the employees/teachers keep spitting on the burger patties before wrapping them up.

If they can make the little (plural expletive deleted) quiet while they're there by filling them full of Ritalin, so teachers can screw with them at their leisure, what's the problem? Who cares what happens when the little (plural expletive deleted) are released from the prison camps?

[Giant Robot]

28. There is a lot of good that can come from this

Unfortunately it is balanced by a lot of bad as well. I would be a lot happier with it if it were just strongly encouraged, and someone came up with a reliable way to assess children. All mental health professionals, myself included, have our own pet theories about things, and some are better than others, but there is not anything out there right now that I know of that I would want to put all kids through even on a voluntary but encouraged basis. Who knows, it may be the start of mental health care getting actual recognition in this country. But I doubt it.

[autorank]

29. This is a GREAT article...I'm stunned.

We have nothing like this in Virginia. It sounds so ingrained up there. There is no need to do
massive screening of children for mental health needs unless you have several factors in place:

(a) pervasive major mental health problems among the population;
(b) highly trained and experienced evaluators; and
(c) a treatment system capable of handling the needs of those referred.

We don't have (b) or (c), that's for sure, and the rate of mental illness among children and adolescents is at a level that can be managed with far less intrusive methods of identification.

When you test everyone, it's too short an intervention to allow for the precision that more intensive, qualified testing would provide, testing driven by need and identification. When you test everyone, you're going to get some false positives too.

This is highly disturbing.

GREAT POST.