Unwanted Screening for Disorders Alive and Well in Obamacare

by | Nov 26, 2012


Those who prefer the government not be involved in searching for undiscovered disorders in their school children were glad to learn that Teenscreen is ending. The Teenscreen National Center announced on November 15, 2012 that they are ending their program of screening students for mental disorders. It will be gone by the end of the year.
But, as we will see, “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”, commonly known has Obamacare, expands the concept of mandatory screening for disorders despite the proven harm caused by Teenscreen.
Teenscreen first appeared when President Bush’s New Freedom Commission for Mental Health suggested that Teenscreen should be used in all 50 states. The NFC also recommended that the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) standards for prescribing psychiatric drugs be used for treatment of the disorders Teenscreen found in students. 
According to The Alliance for Human Research Protection, Teenscreen “was a highly controversial, aggressive, medically dubious mental health screening protocol developed with federal funding by Dr. David Shaffer, chief of child psychiatry at Columbia University.” 
The program found undiagnosed disorders in normal children at an alarming rate using a Yes or No questionnaire. 83% of those Teenscreen found to be in danger of suicide were later shown to be totally without risk. 
Teenscreen and TMAP were later exposed as a scam. Officials in the government and academic psychiatrists had been paid kickbacks from the sale of dangerous psychotropic drugs required by the TMAP guidelines. Teenscreen provided a steady flow of new student victims by finding non-existent disorders in larger and larger numbers of children. 
Nathaniel S. Lehrman, M.D. was at one time the Clinical Director of Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn, NY. and is a critic of his profession. He wrote passionately about the dangers of mental health screening under the NFC.
He notes that years ago mental illness used to describe only those easily observed as insane and they were rare cases. Now the National Institute of Mental Health claims quite falsely that 46% of Americans will have a mental disorder at some point in their lives.
Dr. Lehrman states that screening increases benefit only to the mental health providers and the drug manufacturers. He believes involuntary government sponsored mental health screening represents psychiatric malpractice.
Despite such clear evidence that Teenscreen was a fraud, Obamacare mandates and expands mental health screening.
Page 1137 of the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provides grants for the operation of school-based health centers required to include “mental health and substance abuse disorder assessments” for children and adolescents.
On page 1191 is found a section on Mental Health Screening that refers to a program called “Healthy Aging, Living Well”. Persons ages 55-64 are being targeted for screening activities that can include “mental health/behavioral health and substance use disorders.”
Obamacare requires mental health services for many other groups. 
These include Medicaid recipients, addicts, mothers with postpartum depression, the elderly, and soldiers. There’s even has a section called “Mental Health in Small Businesses” which awards grants to small businesses willing to provide workplace wellness programs that encourage “healthy lifestyles, healthy eating, increased physical activity and improved mental health.”
It’s doubtful that many small business owners would be interested in having their employees working on computers, on the assembly line or driving company equipment while medicated on mind numbing psychiatric drugs. 
With these new forms of screening for disorders coming soon, Americans would be wise to know their rights. Each citizen can decide if taking a potentially dangerous psychiatric drug for a disorder discovered by a government program makes sense to them or not. 
http://www.teenscreen.org/
http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/886/9/   
http://www.jpands.org/vol11no3/lehrman.pdf  
https://www.cchrflorida.org/healthcarebill/

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