Government's Big Lie: The "Crisis" of Babies With Undiagnosed Mental Illness

 

http://magic-city-news.com/article_5541.shtml

 

 From Magic City Morning Star

Guest Column
Government's Big Lie: The "Crisis" of Babies With Undiagnosed Mental Illness
By Laura Adelmann
Mar 21, 2006, 21:01

To the federal government, many newborns, toddlers and preschoolers are undiagnosed mental cases with dire need of "treatment" (read: drugs).

Following the appalling trend of labeling school children with an ever-expanding list of mental disorders and medicating them with the cocaine-class of drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, government is promoting universal mental health screening and treatment " beginning with babies.

The Federal Mental Health Action Agenda, the blueprint to implementing the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, is targeting America's youngest by promoting mental health screenings in places like daycares and schools.

In a 2003 speech, Kathryn Power director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, excitedly reported that mental health assessments " "prevention and intervention" " are increasingly being conducted in "non-mental health settings." She commended one unnamed community for "placing mental health consultants in child care settings." Also touted was the federal "Prevention and Early Intervention Grant Program." Power noted the program's goal is to reach children " and babies " before they "have a diagnosable problem." At that time, Power stated, more than half of the administration's programs were to focus on infants and preschoolers.

Mandatory screening of children against government-defined criteria of what is "mentally healthy" is an Orwellian nightmare; the government will decide if citizens, starting at birth, are "mentally healthy."

Dr. Karen Effrem, a Johns Hopkins-trained pediatrician, researcher and expert on the government's movement toward universal mental health screening, has been sounding the alarm about the dangers of this Big Pharmaceutical movement for years.

She rightly states, "Government sponsored and controlled universal mental health screening, no matter how sweetly wrapped in the fig leaf of parental consent, should never, ever be implemented. It is never, EVER, the proper role of government to set norms for, assess or intervene in the thoughts and emotions of free citizens, much less innocent, vulnerable, and still developing children. It is our thoughts and emotions that make each of us uniquely and individually human, and we use these thoughts and emotions to understand the world and maintain our inalienable right to liberty."

Once a child has been screened, a highly subjective process, their personal medical information will become part of state records, potentially to be used as a screening tool for health care, employment, military or college admissions. An identified child would likely be ushered further into the psychological system for more assessments and "treatment,"a term that's become a euphemism for Big Psychology's first methodology: Drug therapy. And the mental health establishment is not shy about drugging babies. Between 1995 and 1997, psychotropic drug prescriptions for children from 2 to 4 years old grew by 300 percent.