MENTAL HEALTH, EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CONTROL
Part 20

 

 

 

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
October 31, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

Concerning subjects mentioned in the title, there are a number of telling quotations that are important to review here. According to WorldNetDaily, in September 2005 "The Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities designated the non-profit group 'Love in Action' a 'mental health supportive living facility' and informed the (Christian) ministry it must cease operations by Sept. 30 if it didn't apply for a license or comply with the department's demands....Nate Kellum, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund which represents the group, claims the state is 'trying to turn a Christian ministry into a state-regulated mental hospital.'"

"The Final Solution" for Christians might well be via mental health screenings, with proponents now focusing upon children. Georgia State Senator Nancy Schaefer in her July 30, 2005 newsletter titled "Medicating Our Kids to Death," remarked that "children are coerced into mental health screening, they are forced into psychiatric treatment and they are prescribed dangerous psychotropic drugs....Millions of them are diagnosed with alleged mental disorders because they are easily distracted, or they talk out of turn in class, or because they don't follow directions....It is unconscionable....Parental rights must be protected. Parental notification regarding children must be made a priority in this nation....Children belong to parents---their parents ! Children are not the property of the State. Parents are responsible to make decisions regarding their children and their children's health. Children and 'the family' are under dangerous assault today ! Parents are coerced to put their children on psychotropic medications and children are dying. In the United States alone, 8 million children and adolescents are on mind-altering drugs that put them at risk of violent and suicidal side effects."

John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, on October 13, 2005 published an interview with Allen Jones, an investigator for the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and revealed that "Jones' findings in the case showed that the drug company Janssen had paid honorariums to key state officials who held significant influence over the prescriptions issued for state institutions such as prisons and mental health hospitals. Although the accounts receiving these payments were marked for 'educational grants,' funds were being channeled to state employees who developed guidelines recommending new, more expensive drugs rather than older, cheaper drugs with safe, proven effects....Jones discovered that one of the new drugs being recommended, Risperdal, has been shown to have potentially lethal side effects such as ketoacidosis, coma and possible death. After initially revealing his discoveries to OIG managers, Jones was taken off the case but told that he could pursue it on his own. In the words of the OIG supervisor who took Jones off the case and participated in threatening him, 'Drug companies write checks to politicians...on both sides of the aisle.'

"The Pennsylvania formulary investigated by Jones (known as PennMap) is based on the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which was named as a model program by President Bush's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health....Jones firmly stated that 'the same political/pharmaceutical alliance that generated the Texas project was behind the New Freedom Commission' and was 'poised to consolidate that TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy...with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects....Each state has a menu of drugs from which a doctor can prescribe, which is called the formulary....What TMAP did was essentially take all the old generic drugs off the shelf and require exclusive usage of brand-new patented, very expensive medications. TMAP has the pharmaceutical industry's fingerprints all over it---from inception to development through exportation to the different states and internationally.

'TMAP was born under Bush's stewardship as governor of Texas. The pharmaceutical industry started lavishing a lot of money on the Texas university system and Texas mental health officials during Bush's tenure in the 1990s....The program began with the $1.6 million grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It is the charitable arm of Johnson and Johnson, which owns Janssen Pharmaceutical, which had some of the principal drugs in the TMAP formularies in the TMAP algorithms....By 1998, they were being sent to Beijing to push it internationally.

'The Medicaid program picked up the tab for a lot of these drugs. Moreover, money was pushed toward drugs at this time in the absence of any solid science whatsoever proving they were effective or safe....(These new drugs are) hundreds of times more expensive. Another study that was done in the Veterans Administration Hospital showed that Haldo, an old drug at five cents per pill, performed as well as Risperdal and Zyprexa at $8 per pill. I mean, we are talking multiples. You can get all manner of deadly side effects....Risperdal in particular causes stroke in geriatric populations.

'The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health is an out and out sham....If you look at the composition of the Board, many had direct or indirect ties with the pharmaceutical industry, to George Bush, to TMAP. And they were disproportionately Texans on that commission.

'I was an investigator with the Office of the Inspector General for the State of Pennsylvania....I came back to it after Tom Ridge had gutted it. He changed the OIG from a fraud-fighting entity to an entity that was designed to cover up the truth....The fellow who was the Pennsylvania head of the Mental Health System at the time that TMAP was brought into that state was there when illegal accounts were opened and used. He approved the implementation of TMAP in Pennsylvania and oversaw the people who oversaw the accounts. He was then appointed to go to Washington, DC, by President Bush to head the federal SAMHSA or Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. From there, he has been championing TMAP, TeenScreen and the agenda of the New Freedom Commission. And when he left to go to DC, Ridge appointed as the head of Mental Health Services of Pennsylvania the marketing director of Eli Lilly, the mega giant pharmaceutical corporation. It was this Eli Lilly marketing director who was at the helm of the Mental Health Services Agency in Pennsylvania at the time I tried to raise the alarm.

'Every drug pushed in the TMAP program initially now has black box warnings for deadly side effects. How can we calculate the cost in human terms?...The same political pharmaceutical alliance that generated the Texas project was behind the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, and they are poised to do this nationwide.'"

There have been success stories in the fight against universal mental health screenings. According to EdWatch's Legislative/Congressional report of September 2005, "the State of Minnesota defeated universal mental health screenings 'at least once by age 3' as part of mandatory kindergarten screening, setting a precedent for other states. With strong assistance from EdWatch, Texas defeated an expensive amendment for a universal mental health screening system for people in the state across the life span starting in preschool, with no protections for parents from coercion. Also with strong EdWatch assistance, Tennessee came very close to passing legislation prohibiting schools from coercing parents either to medicate their children with psychotropic drugs or submit them to mental health screening. And Florida passed legislation permitting parents to refuse psychological screening of their children and prohibit the schools from compelling parents to medicate their children."

The public schools seem to be the main battleground over this issue at the moment. And it is because the public schools have dumbed down students over the past 40 years that our nation is in its current crisis. When noted historian and author David McCullough was given the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award in 1995, he opined: "We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate. The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it's taken to come this far....I speak also from experience.

On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting, I sat with a seminar of some 25 students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students---the cream of the crop. 'How many of you know who George Marshall was?' I asked. None. Not one. Who's to blame? We are. Everywhere in the country there are grade school and high school teachers teaching history who have had little or no history in their own education. Our school system, the schools we are responsible for, could rightly be charged with educational malpractice....As Thomas Jefferson said, 'Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be.'"

Seven years later, McCullough as keynote speaker addressed the National Book Festival on October 12, 2002 in Washington, DC, and his opinion of the situation hadn't improved. He chastised: "As we have been told many times, and I have said, particularly when I have had such a platform as this, we are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate. And shame on us ! There is no excuse for it, and it shouldn't just make us sad or dismayed, it should make us angry. It's dangerous and we have to do something about it."

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Yes, ending their ongoing educational malpractice is what our schools should be about rather than the coercive mental health screening and drugging of our children.

To read Part 1 through 19 click-----> here

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