MENTAL HEALTH, EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CONTROL
Part 6

 

 

 

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
January 24, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

There are many who believe that recent federal legislation mandates mental health screening of children. However, it does not! Therefore, it seems appropriate at this time to explain what has transpired and why there are concerns.

In February 2001, almost immediately after taking office, President George W. Bush announced his New Freedom Initiative. Then on April 29, 2002, President Bush established the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFCMH), which developed a number of recommendations, among which was mental health screening for Americans, especially children. Then, H.R. 5006 was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives, and it was later rolled into the larger H.R. 4818, which on December 8, 2004 became Public Law 108-447. In this law, Division F, Title II concerns "Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services," which provides funds for mental health "data collection and evaluation activities." Since it was logical to assume this could include mental health screenings, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul tried to amend the earlier legislation (H.R. 5006) to exclude such screenings, but he was defeated. Later, he tried to amend legislation at least to require parental permission before such screenings would occur. However, he was once again defeated, primarily by U.S. Senate leader Bill Frist and Sen. Arlen Specter. This logically has resulted in the conclusion that Congress indeed does want to allow funds from this public law to be used for mental health screening of children, perhaps even without parental permission. To try to overcome this, Rep. Paul on January 4, 2005 introduced H.R. 181 into the new 109th Congress. The bill is titled "To Prohibit the Use of Federal Funds for Any Universal or Mandatory Mental Health Screening Program" (short title: "Parental Consent Act of 2005").

Although there is no federal law mandating mental health screening, lawyer Phyllis Schlafly in her November 24, 2004 article "No Child Left Unmedicated" has written that "President Bush has instructed 25 federal agencies to develop a plan to implement the NFCMH's recommendations." In her article, she further explained that the NFCMH "recommends 'routine and comprehensive' testing and mental health screening for every child in America, including preschoolers....The NFCMH proposes utilizing electronic medical records for mental health interrogation of both children and adults for mental illnesses in school and during routine physical exams. The NFCMH also recommends integrating electronic health records and personal health information systems. The NFCMH recommends 'linkage' of these mental examinations with 'state-of-the-art treatments' using 'specific medications for specific conditions.'...'State-of-the-art treatments' will result in many thousands of children being medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous drugs. The long-term safety and effectiveness of psychiatric medications on children have never been proven. The side effects of suggested medications in children are severe. They include suicide, violence, psychosis, cardiac toxicity, and growth suppression. Several school shooters, such as Eric Harris (Columbine) and Kip Kinkel (Oregon) had been on antidepressants or stimulants when they committed their crimes.....A Columbia University pilot project of screening students called TeenScreen resulted in one-third being flagged as 'positive' for mental health problems, and half of those being turned over for mental health treatment. If this is a preview of what would happen when 52 million public school students are screened, it would mean hanging a libelous label on 17 million American children and putting 8 million children into the hands of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry." Why isn't this considered cruelty to children?

And to make it clear that the NFCMH recommendations do not only include children, Dr. Karen Effrem at Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum Conference on September 18, 2004, explained that the NFCMH recommends "screening for mental disorders in primary health care, across the life span, and connect to treatment and supports." Dr. Effrem emphasized, "That is cradle-to-grave."

In an earlier part of this series, I mentioned that President Bush had appointed Sidney Taurel, chairman and CEO of Eli Lilly, to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Eli Lilly & Co. (pharmaceuticals) has manufactured thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative recently removed from childhood vaccines, which has been the subject of recent lawsuits. On November 4, 2002, WRAL television in Raleigh, NC, aired a report stating that "a study sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows infants immunized with thimerosal vaccines were 2.5 times more likely to develop neurological disorders, but it was never released (autismlayer.net)." And on December 11, 2004 Reuters reporters Maggie Fox and Joanne Kenen wrote that "members of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate vowed to get rid of controversial provisions, slipped quietly into the Homeland Security Act, that they say benefit vaccine makers at the expense of children with autism and other diseases....Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist said the provisions came from a bill he was sponsoring that was aimed at encouraging more companies to make vaccines."

Another drug widely used on children today is Ritalin, which was first marketed by Ciba Company in 1957. According to THE DAN SMOOT REPORT (August 17, 1970), "In the 1960s, psychologists discovered that Ritalin works on the central nervous system in children, with a tranquilizing effect. By the late 1960s, Ritalin was being used widely as a personality-changing, mind-controlling drug on small children....(But some) authorities expressed grave concern. Dr. John Dorsey, a Birmingham pediatrician, said: ' Here we are trying...to combat increased use of drugs in adolescents, and the schools are recommending that kids be put on this personality-changing drug at the age of five and six.'...Fritz Redl, professor of behavioral science at Wayne State, said ' Ritalin and related drugs are just one more threat in the continuing chemical warfare we are waging on our children.'" (See "Drug Is Called Peril to Pupils" by Robert Kraus, DETROIT FREE PRESS, November 7, 1969.)

More recently, Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on the Fox News Network (September 26, 2002) interviewed Neil Bush (President Bush's brother) and his son Pierce. Colmes began by saying "Neil Bush says too many parents are pressured by educators to give their kids powerful drugs they really don't need. Seven years ago, teachers diagnosed his own son, Pierce, with Attention Deficit Disorder. And doctors prescribed Ritalin to help him concentrate. They later found out Pierce never had ADD." Pierce Bush said ADD is "way overdiagnosed," and both Neil Bush and Sean Hannity said drugs are "overprescribed" for children. Hannity then commented, "Ritalin acts on the brain the same way cocaine does. And you see now there's a lot of abuse of Ritalin."

Given what Neil and Pierce Bush said, one must wonder why President Bush isn't being more cautious concerning the mental health aspects of his New Freedom Initiative? Perhaps it is because of the influence of communitarianism upon his thinking. In Dana Milbank's February 1, 2001 WASHINGTON POST article, "Needed: Catchword for Bush Ideology; 'Communitarianism' Finds Favor," one reads: "...Some Bush advisors and friends say...his actions have less to do with the left vs. the right than with his embrace of many of the ideas contained in the movement known as 'communitarianism,' which places the importance of society ahead of the unfettered rights of the individual. 'This is the ultimate Third Way,' said Don Eberly, an advisor in the Bush White House, using a favorite phrase of President Clinton....Bush's inaugural address, said George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, a communitarian thinker, 'was a communitarian text.'...That's no accident: Bush's advisors consulted on the speech with Robert D. Putnam of Harvard University (a leading communitarian thinker). At the same time, Bush has recruited some of the leading thinkers of the 'civil society,' or 'communitarian,' movements to his White House....Top Bush strategist Karl Rove introduced Bush to the thinking." With all of the infringements upon our rights today, someone has recently recalled that "freedom is slavery" in George Orwell's 1984 "Newspeak" or "doublethink."

Returning to former FBI agent Dan Smoot, in his REPORT of October 31, 1966, he asked, "When will our water supplies be similarly treated with mind-control drugs to promote mental health?" Smoot further indicated that on August 14, 1965, HEALTH BULLETIN quoted Dr. Joseph W. Goldzieher, a Texas physician, as saying that governments could control quantity and quality of populations by use of birth-control chemicals, made compulsory upon entire populations "just as salt is iodized or water is fluoridated."

It is worth emphasizing here Dr. Goldzieher's reference to fluoridated water, because prior to its use in water, fluoride had been primarily associated with bug and rat poison. In 1947, President Harry Truman appointed Oscar R. Ewing to head the Federal Security Agency, which included the Public Health Service (later HEW). Ewing hired Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew) to develop a propaganda campaign which was successful in getting the American public to accept water fluoridation. Bernays in 1928 had authored PROPAGANDA, in which he wrote: "Those who manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country....It remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons....It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world....As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented." In case the American public doesn't believe the current Bush administration is capable of using "propaganda," it should be remembered that in early January 2005 it was revealed that the administration had paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote "No Child Left Behind." The administration had already been criticized for distributing video news releases portrayed as "news reports" promoting Medicare reform and new prescription drug benefits for senior citizens.

By the late 1940s, a "science of coercion" had been developed, and in Colin Simpson's SCIENCE OF COERCION: COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE 1945-1960, he refers to "the engineering of consent of targeted populations at home and abroad....Various leaders in the social sciences engaged one another in tacit alliances to promote their particular interpretation of society....They regarded mass communication as a tool for social management and as a weapon in social conflict....Key academic journals of the day...concentrated on how modern technology could be used by elites to manage social change, extract political concessions, or win purchasing decisions from targeted audiences....This orientation reduced the extraordinarily complex, inherently communal process of communication to simple models based on the dynamics of transmission of persuasive---and, in the final analysis,coercive---messages."

Returning to the subject of water fluoridation, what the American public was not told is how the Nazis had used it to control people. In Dr. Swinburne Clymer's THE AGE OF TREASON (1957), he revealed: "Charles Eliot Perkins, a research worker in chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology,...was sent by the United States Government to help take charge of the I. G. Farben chemical plants in Germany at the end of the second world war. What follows are statements from a letter which Mr. Perkins wrote the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research on October 2, 1954....'In the 1930s Hitler and the German Nazis envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by the Nazi philosophy....The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population of whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in the women, and so on. In this scheme of mass control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place....The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty....There is a small area of the brain tissue that is responsible for the individual's power to resist domination. Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluorine will in time gradually reduce the individual's power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narcotizing this area of the brain tissue and make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him....Any person who drinks artificially fluorinated water for a period of one year or more will never again be the same person, mentally or physically.'"

Not only did the Nazis control populations via water fluoridation, but also through eugenics as well. In SOURCE BOOK ON EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS (1937) by William Rappard, Walter R. Sharp, et al, one reads: "A new educational policy has been developed by the Nazis and is now in operation....The terms of an express order issued by the Minister of Education on January 15, 1935 (are) to the effect that courses of instruction in biology shall deal primarily with questions of heredity,...mental traits....It is the duty of such institutions to separate the unsuitable and unworthy from those more fitted and capable of advancement and promotion. Constant tests must be made as to physical, moral, mental and general qualifications."

More recently, this eugenic mentality was displayed in the 1996 film, "Extreme Measures," in which Gene Hackman plays a doctor conducting medical experiments on homeless people and killing them. He claims that the ends justify the means, and that ultimately society will benefit from his findings. He tells the film's hero, Hugh Grant: "If you can cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn't you have to do that? Wouldn't that be the brave thing to do?" But Grant challenges Hackman's rationale by pointing out that he never gave his victims a choice as to whether they wanted to "volunteer" to help society. Grant states, "You're not God. I don't care if you can find a cure for every disease on this planet. You tortured and murdered those men, and that makes you a disgrace to your profession."

Just as it was necessary for Hugh Grant to question what Gene Hackman was doing, it is necessary for Americans to question what the so-called experts will be doing concerning the mental health screenings recommended by the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

� 2005 Dennis Cuddy - All Rights Reserved

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