Cheryl,
Unfortunately, few states have laws that would prohibit a school from requiring drugs. And CPS has removed a large number of kids from their homes for parental non-compliance- "neglect".
There are only a handful of states that protect parents rights in this matter. Texas is one.
FYI,
Texans For Safe Education
John Breeding, PhD, Director
5306 Fort Clark Dr.
Austin, Texas 78745
The Honorable Lloyd Doggett 3-3-05
201 Cannon House Office Bldg.
(Independence and 1st Street, SE)
Washington DC 20515-0001
Dear Representative Doggett,
Please co-sponsor H.R. 181, known as the Parental Consent Act of 2005, sponsored by Representatives Ron Paul and Tom Feeney. I ask this as your
constituent, and on behalf of our citizens group, Texans For Safe Education (TFSE), of which I am the Director. Our group formed in 2000 out of our
concern for the ever-increasing role of psychiatry, especially psychiatric drugs in the schools. We worked very hard to ensure the passage of two new Texas laws in 2003 (House Bills 1406 and 320) that now serve to protect
parents and their children against undue coercion by the schools and Child Protective Services, respectively, to psychiatrically label and drug their children. Now we are extremely alarmed at the prospect of universal mental health screening in the schools. We implore you to take a leadership role in defense of our children and parents and in support of our schools' true
mission, by signing on and working for passage of H.R. 181's Prohibition Against Federal Funding of Universal Or Mandatory Mental Health Screening.
The recommendations and resultant initiatives toward universal mental health screening stem from the President's New Freedom Commission recommendations for Mental Health policy in the United States. We think this is a very wrong
and dangerous idea for many reasons, including the following.
1) The current reality is that we are already drugging an estimated 10 million school age children in the United States with addictive and
dangerous psychotropic substances, including stimulants controlled by the Drug Enforcement administration because of their high addictive potential and risk of abuse, antidepressants now banned in the UK and given a severe Black Box warning in this country because of their proven tendency to increase aggressive or suicidal thinking and action in a certain percentage of young people who take them, and ntipsychotics, which are known to cause permanent neurological damage in the majority of people who take them for a very long time. We are already drugging at least 15% of our young people, and this is horribly wrong!
2) The New Freedom Commission consisted largely of so-called experts who were involved in the mid-90s with development of the Texas Medication
Algorithm Project (TMAP), a formulary developed for Mental Health and Mental Retardation (MHMR) in Texas, whereby specific psychotropic drugs are
mandated for different so-called mental illnesses. It has recently been clearly revealed in Texas media that TMAP development was significantly funded by private corporate pharmaceutical industries, which have subsequently reaped massive profits from sale of their key drugs that are included in the algorithms. This is bad ethics, and has cost the state MHMR and Medicaid systems millions upon millions of dollars. We would very much like for you to use your office to investigate this ethics matter for the state of Texas. We think it is extremely unethical and tragic to continue this trend, and use our nation's schoolchildren as pharmaceutical industry profit points. Vital to understand is that implementation of mental health
screening in the schools, however benevolent the rhetoric might sound, can only result in even more of our precious children being placed unnecessarily on dangerous psychotropic drugs.
3) The truth is that not one of these popular child psychiatric diagnoses (eg., ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, etc.) has been validated in the scientific literature as having an identifiable physical or chemical abnormality. There is no independent objective test for ADHD or Bipolar or Childhood Depression or any of these so-called mental illnesses. Biopsychiatry is a pseudoscience, and these drugs are extremely dangerous. All these diagnoses are entirely subjective opinions about groupings of various behaviors, which means that a very high percentage of young people can be labeled-hence the dangers of mental health screening.
4) Schools should be about academic education. The vast presence of psychiatry in the schools has resulted in a huge industry, one in which the
intent of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to assure that we meet the educational needs of physically handicapped children has been eroded so greatly that fully 60% of the qualifying "disabilities" today
are entirely subjective categories such as non-specific learning disabilities and psychiatric diagnoses like ADHD. Since there is no objective physical disability, the sad fact is that these labels and drugs are about social control, an all too tragic modern version of eugenic philosophy that blames social differences on genetics and uses biological and genetic justification to enforce a certain ideology and standard. Mental health screening in the schools only further erodes and undermines the true mission of education, and greatly stigmatizes and harms our
children in the process.
5) The bottom line is discovered by "following the money." In this case, it is particularly tragic that our nation's children have become immense profit points for the pharmaceutical industry. It is shameful that our government
schools have become the major conduit of millions of our children into psychiatric labeling and drug use.
The American public does not want further intrusion of psychiatry into the schools. There is a vast outpouring of protest against the New Freedom Commission's recommendations for universal mental health screening. Texans For Safe Education, together with Parents for a Label and Drug Free Education, has collected 7500 signators to our "Declaration of Refusal to
comply with any new freedom commission mandate for universal mental health screening of children in the schools." The concluding statement of this
declaration is as follows:
"We have philosophical or moral objections to government-sponsored intrusion of psychiatry into the schools. The legal doctrines of privacy and informed consent reflect underlying value placed on privacy, autonomy, and informed consent. We consider New Freedom recommendations to be a serious threat not only to our educational system, but most importantly to the development and well-being of our children. Therefore, we insist that any New Freedom Commission policy recommendations that put our children at risk for
unwarranted intrusion, labeling and psychiatric drugging be immediately discarded." (
http://www.ablechild.org/declaration%20 ... fusal.aspx)
In conclusion, H.R. 181 is about protecting privacy, about parental rights, the appropriate role of the schools, and major ethical failures in allowing corporate pharmaceutical industry money to influence our educational and mental health systems. Most importantly, this legislation challenges the burgeoning and very harmful practice of drugging literally millions of our precious school age children. I call it institutionalized child abuse.
Representative Doggett, we ask that you co-sponsor H.R. 181, the Parental Consent Act of 2005, and that you take a leadership position on this issue. Please let me know of your thoughts and decisions on this request, and know that we are available with information and support at any time.
Sincerely and Respectfully Yours,
John Breeding, PhD
***************
Unfortunately,
Parental rights are ignored, with no public hearing in sight
Hartford, Connecticut Legislative Education Committee failed to act on a parental informed consent bill that would ensure that parents receive full informed consent prior to any psychiatric testing being done on their children
in public schools. This bill HB #5328 was written to safeguard parental rights and would have ensured that each parent be provided with certain regulations and amendments, informing them of their basic right to "opt out" of psychiatric
testing for their children through state public schools. Connecticut was a frontrunner in protecting parental rights, by being the first state to pass a law to prohibit schools from recommending psychotropic drugs to parents for
their children. This first state law prompted several other states to take similar action in response to a parental outcry, in which reports by parents of schools coercing them to place their children on psychotropic drugs (e.g.
Ritalin) to remain in school became all too common. The states' response and chain reaction, in turn, led to similar Federal legislation, "The Prohibition on Mandatory Medication Amendment," signed into law by the President December 3,
2004.
In the wake of so much turmoil and grave concerns, an informed consent bill, looks like a safety net where there is none. The bottom line is that parents cannot make educated decisions without being provided with all the facts.
Today, schools continue to profile children for mental disorders like ADHD by using subjective checklists, rating scales, or assessments, not even endorsed or approved by local, state or federal government. Parents are not being told
this. These same subjective psychiatric assessments for ADHD were removed from the state of Neuvo Leon in Mexico last year by the Secretary of Education herself, due to their subjective and unscientific nature.
The culmination of events questioning the safety and efficacy of behavior modifying drugs on children, and the subjective assessments used in psychiatric diagnoses, should not be discounted. Everyone needs to be asking why the state's education committee blatantly turned a blind eye to parental rights, and disregarded widespread concerns without providing for a hearing on this matter.
More pointedly, we should be asking why America, or her states, is not ensuring parental rights and protecting children's health and safety.
For more information on ADHD, informed consent, and mental health within education please visit our site at
http://www.ablechild.org.
