Teenscreen and the drug companies--discussion board
Teenscreen and The Drug Companies
Discussion Board
The Controversy. "TeenScreen is a very controversial so-called 'diagnostic psychiatric service', aka suicide survey; done on children who are then referred to psychiatric treatment. The evidence suggests that the objective of the psychiatrists who designed TeenScreen is to place children so selected on psychotropic drugs. 'It's just a way to put more people on prescription drugs,' said Marcia Angell, a medical ethics lecturer at Harvard Medical School and author of 'The Truth About Drug Companies.'" psychsearch.net. "TeenScreen has become the subject of much controversy. It has been criticized for conducting screenings [sponsored by schools] without explicit parental consent and relying instead on passive consent whereby consent is assumed if it is not explicitly denied. TeenScreen's percent of false-positives for their screening tool is 84%. Which means the program 'would result in 84 nonsuicidal teens being referred for further evaluation for every 16 youths correctly identified.' The creator of the screening questionnaire, David Shaffer, has stated; '[TeenScreen] does identify a whole bunch of kids who aren’t really suicidal, so you get a lot of false-positives.' Due to the high rate of false-positives for the screening, critics also allege that students in the program are liable to be prescribed inappropriate psychiatric drugs.'" wikipedia.org.
Indiana Lawsuit. "Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana on behalf of an Indiana family whose 15-year-old daughter, Chelsea Rhoades, was subjected to a mental health screening examination at school without her parents’ knowledge or consent. Institute attorneys charge that school officials violated Michael and Teresa Rhoades’ constitutional right, as parents, to control the care, custody and upbringing of their daughter when Chelsea was subjected to the mental health exam without their knowledge or consent. Mental health screening exams like TeenScreen have increasingly been adopted by schools in 43 states." rutherford.org. See Complaint filed by Rhodes family.
Youtube video:
Normal entries in this area of our web site center on class action matters. The current case pending in Indiana involving Teenscreen has not been filed as a class action case; however, given the issue potential impact upon thousands of parents and their children across the nation, I thought it appropriate to cover this issue.
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