Free Republic

An amendment offered by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, in the House of Representatives yesterday that would have remove from an appropriations bill a new mandatory mental-health screening program for America's children failed by a vote of 95-315. Paul's amendment would have removed the program from the Labor, HHS and Education Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Ninety-four Republicans and one Democrat sided with Paul, while 118 Republicans, 196 Democrats and one Independent voted against the amendment. As WorldNetDaily reported, the New Freedom Initiative recommends screening not only for children but eventually for every American. The initiative came out of the...

VATICAN CITY (AP)--The Vatican issued a report Monday by non-Catholic sex abuse experts who criticized the policy adopted by U.S. bishops of removing abusive priests from the ministry, saying it was overly harsh and would not protect the young. The report was released days before U.S. bishops issue their own national survey on sex abuse by clergy, which is expected to find more than 4,000 American priests have been accused of molesting minors since 1950--far more than previously estimated. Still, the U.S. study may also show the number of cases has declined dramatically since the 1990s, and victims fear it...

Reports are circulating that psychiatrists have cleared for unsupervised home visits the moron who shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster. We’ll set aside the fact that Hinckley tried to assassinate the president of the United States. Let’s just say that his attempt was on the life of another human being, and in particular one who had done him no harm. That sort of thing happens every day in America. If you recall, just a few weeks back some fellow got a pistol and tried to kill an attorney involved in a case related to financial matters. You must have seen...

Antidepressants are widely believed to be exceptionally effective medications. The data, however, tell a different story. Kirsch et al. (2002a) analyzed the data sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the manufacturers of the six most widely prescribed antidepressants (fluoxetine [Prozac], paroxetine [Paxil], sertraline [Zoloft], venlafaxine [Effexor], nefazodone [Serzone] and citalopram [Celexa]). Their research showed that although the response to antidepressants was substantial, the response to inert placebo was almost as great. The mean difference was about two points on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D). Although statistically significant, this difference is not clinically significant (Jacobson et...