President Bush’s little-publicized New Freedom
Commission on Mental Health has proposed comprehensive
mental-illness screening for all Americans. If this
proposal is carried out, which is Bush’s intention,
no adult or child will be safe from intrusive probing by
“experts,” backed by drug companies, who
believe that mental illness is woefully underdiagnosed
and therefore that many millions of people ought to be
taking powerful and expensive psychiatric drugs. Schools
and doctors’ offices will become quasi-psychiatric
monitoring stations.
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas tried to forbid the federal
government from funding mental-health screening, but the
House turned down his amendment to the appropriations
bill for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Paul, a physician, said the program was a usurpation of
parental rights, pointing out that parents can already be
charged with child abuse for refusing to give their
children Ritalin for alleged attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder. He said, “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.”
Another physician, Karen Effrem, also opposes the plan:
“Universal mental-health screening and the drugging
of children, as recommended by the New Freedom
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.”
People wrongly assume that psychiatric diagnoses are like
medical diagnoses. They’re not. Medical diagnoses
are ultimately based on objective biological evidence.
Psychiatric diagnoses, as retired psychiatry professor
Thomas Szasz shows, are based on what people say and do.
This means that such diagnoses are moral and political,
not medical, judgments. It begs the question to say that
brain science is still in its infancy: Why is one kind of
behavior interpreted as a sign of mental or brain disease
but not another kind? Besides, Szasz writes, behavior has
reasons not causes. That principle is at the very core of
what we mean by personhood. (Brain-scan technology cannot
refute this principle because it does not identify causes
of behavior. Correlation is not causation.)
Thus the New Freedom Commission recommendation that
everyone be screened for mental illness whenever he goes
to the doctor and that children be monitored for mental
illness in the government’s schools is simply a plan
to stigmatize people for “inappropriate”
behavior and speech. It is also a plan for the widespread
drugging of adults and children under government
supervision. Besides the Huxleyian aspects of this idea,
there is also reason to fear improper influence by drug
companies.
Allen Jones, formerly of the Pennsylvania Office of
Inspector General, revealed that a similar program was
started in his state after drug companies curried favor
with state officials. According to the British
Medical Journal, “In July 2002 Mr Jones was
appointed lead investigator when he uncovered evidence of
payments into an off-the-books account. The account,
earmarked for ‘educational grants’ was funded
in large part by Pfizer and Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
Payments were made from the account to state employees
who developed formulary guidelines recommending expensive
new drugs over older, cheaper drugs with proved track
records. One of the recommended drugs was Janssen’s
... Risperdal — a drug that has recently been found
to have potentially lethal side effects.”
In a statement last January, Jones said, “The
industry was influencing state officials with trips,
perks, lavish meals, transportation to and first-class
accommodations in major cities. Some state employees were
paid honorariums of up to $2,000 for speaking in
their official capacities at
drug-company–sponsored events.”
Jones was relieved of his duties after blowing the
whistle. In court papers challenging the state’s
move he said the government was attempting to “cover
up, discourage, and limit any investigations or oversight
into the corrupt practices of large drug companies and
corrupt public officials who have acted with them.”
The New Freedom Commission has gotten little publicity.
One hopes that as Americans learn about its ominous
proposal for wholesale mental-illness screening and
psychiatric drugging of them and their children, they
will vehemently object.
