Posted on 09/07/2004 8:48:00 PM PDT by Changing Worldviews
Welcome to FR.
Is your name because of you having changed your worldview or because that is what you are attempting to do? I haven't been to your website yet, but I will check it out.
Below is the email that I sent to my list last night after reading about this program in an alert from Ron Paul's liberty Committee -- supported by the Bush administration, apparently.
"Some of you won't like this. Some of you will hate it and the rest may think me mad. I'm not mad, but I am angry. Very, very angry.
It's the eternal vigilance and liberty thing again.
I just got this alert from Ron Paul's Liberty Committee and it requires action to help Representative Paul's admendment pass to protect our children from more Federal meddling brought to you by compasionate government.
Every $&%@ time, I try to find it within me to support George Bush, he does something like this and I lose any desire to vote for him. I support him in the war on terror. We do need to aggressively fight and win that war, but if we lose our rights and our liberties at home while fighting to provide freedom abroad, what good is it?
Where does the Federal government pretend to get the authority to order our children be screened for mental health problems and have them 'medicated' against the wishes of the parents? Will normal and rambuctious children be labeled and stigmatized as mentally ill based on some vague Federal standard? If they can do this, what will they claim is within the scope of their authority next? Who is the parent here and who has the responsibility for their children?
The pharmaceutical companies are supposedly behind this. On the one hand they want the government off their back to develop life saving and life altering drugs and for the most part, I agree with them. But when they ask to partner with government to force their products on us and our children, I say to Hell with them and the damned politicians that vote for these things and the man who signs it into law. Even if it is the beloved, adored, compassionate conservative George W. Bush. To Hell with them all.
I know that some of you'll say that he's still better than John F'n Kerry, and I can understand wanting a President to project enough power to protect and defend the nation. That's well within, indeed, it is their primary Constitutional mandate. But do you want the President to be the parent to your child too? I don't. I'm not willing to surrender my children to the care and custody of a bureaucracy no matter who runs it.
Kerry will do all this and more, you say. Maybe. Maybe Congress will stand up to President Kerry more than they are willing to with President Bush. They're both taking us to the same inglorious end of our Republic, though one may get us there sooner than the other. But which one?
November 2nd is coming. Time to pick your poison.
Ray Horvath
ACTION ALERT
September 7, 2004
The American tradition of parents deciding what is best for their children is, yet again, under attack. The pharmaceutical industry has convinced President Bush to support mandatory mental-health screening for every child in America, including preschool children, and the industry is now working to convince Congress as well. But mandatory screening alone is not what the pharmaceutical industry wants. The real payoff for the drug companies is the forced drugging of children that will result -- as we learned tragically with Ritalin -- even when parents refuse.
Congressman Ron Paul, an OB/GYN physician for over 30 years, is desperately trying to keep the drug companies, politicians and federal bureaucrats from becoming parents to your children. Dr. Paul will introduce on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning (whenever the floor schedule allows) an amendment to the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Act for FY 2005 that will withhold funds for this new federal mental-health-screening program. He will urge his congressional colleagues to support his effort in a letter to be distributed tomorrow morning.
Dr. Paul's letter says in part: "As you know, psychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children's typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs. Yet some parents have even been charged with child abuse for refusing to drug their children. The federal government should not promote national mental health screening programs that will force the use of these psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin."
If you think this action alert is about something that "can't happen here," think again. In 1995, the state of Texas launched the Texas Medication Algorithm Project. (WorldNetDaily.com, June 21, 2004)
The state of Illinois has also approved a mental health screening program. The Illinois legislature passed the Children?s Mental Health Act of 2003 which will provide screening for "all children ages 0-18" and "ensure appropriate and culturally relevant assessment of your children's social and emotional development with the use of standardized tools." In addition, all pregnant women in Illinois are to be screened for depression.
Dr. Karen R. Effrem, another physician and leading opponent of mandatory screening recently stated, "Universal mental health screening and the drugging of children, as recommended by the New Freedom Commission [presidential commission], needs to be stopped so that many thousands if not millions of children will be saved from receiving stigmatizing diagnoses that would follow them for the rest of their lives. America's school children should not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous medications based on vague and dubious diagnoses."
Dr. Effrem warns of the following:
1. Parental rights are unclear or non-existent under these screening programs.
2. Parents are already being coerced to put their children on psychiatric medications and some children are dying because of it.
3. Mental health screening does not prevent suicide.
4. Mental health diagnoses are ?subjective? and ?social constructions? as admitted by the authors of the diagnostic manuals themselves.
5. Most psychiatric medications do not work in children.
6. The side effects of these medications in children are severe.
7. The untoward influence by the pharmaceutical industry, or at least the impropriety, is abundantly clear in two important aspects of this issue.
8. Merging screening with the academic standards required by No Child Left Behind, as is happening in Illinois, will lead to diagnosis for political reasons. School mental health and violence prevention programs funded by NCLB and government counterterrorism operations are already using such criteria as "homophobia" and "defenders of the US Constitution against federal government and the UN" to label school children and US citizens as mentally unstable and violent.
Texas first...Illinois second...and the rest of America to follow if we aren't successful within the next 24 to 36 hours. We'll be calling on House members' offices tomorrow asking for votes in favor of Dr. Paul's amendment to stop this forced, federal mental-health screening.
Join concerned citizens from Eagle Forum, Gun Owners of America, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Concerned Women of America, Freedom 21, the Alliance for Human Research Protection, and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology to get Dr. Paul?s amendment passed.
One last note...if mental-health screening for every American child isn't bad enough, how about mandatory mental-health screening for every American adult? Yes, that's coming too. The final report of the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health states, "Both children and adults will be screened for mental illnesses during their routine physical exams."
Please help. Urge your U.S. representative to support the Paul amendment and ask family and friends to do the same. To send your message, go to
http://capwiz.com/liberty/issues/alert/?alertid=6333001&type=CO
After you've sent your message, forward to your family and friends the following page: http://www.thelibertycommittee.org/update09.07.04.htm
Kent Snyder
The Liberty Committee
Details of Dr. Effrem's Points:
http://edaction.org/2004/082704.htm
"Bush to screen population for mental illness" by WorldNetDaily.com
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078
Damn. I never believed much in shrinks, but this guy was good. ;-)
LOL!
Actually, that's what he said about everyone who wasn't dribbling snot down their face and being mind numbed in first grade.
He thought that my reading interests were 'alarming'.
I guess he felt threatened by a first grader interested in geology and was actually reading.
Damn. Geology in first grade. You were demented. ;-)
If I was in the government school system today, I'd be labeled for sure. It's a long story that I'll tell someday, but instead of getting a psychiatric diagnosis and drugs, I got promoted from the 2nd to the 4th grade.
LOL!
I was also interested in chemistry as well as anachronistic weaponry.
I was always asking, "Well, how is it made?"
And promptly wanted to see how.
This was the early 80's, and any children taht were highly intelligent found themselves labeled by lazy school workers as hyper-active.
Asking questions and being inquisitive began to be a 'no-no'.
And in the school system this was in, they had a rather draconian way of dealing with 'things'.
They had permanent files on you, and once classified by crazy Doc Katz, you were blackmarked for good.
Best partwas when Doc Katz split, they had a rather perky lady come in to re-evaluate us.
She said out loud that she had not a clue why Doc Katz put in my file what he did.
But, when she went to change the recommendation on file, the higher ups said "no dice".
And the school system wondered why drug use and in school crime went up.
*chuckle*
Treat people as crazy or as criminals when they're not, and people will have no disincentive to act as apparently expected.
These guys are a Scientology front. Take anything they say with several cubic feet of salt.
I got out of HS in the late 60s before it got too bad.
We can recall those days and the idiots that we dealt with now and laugh. I don't want my grandkids anywhere near a government school.
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