Meant to save teen lives, survey now under siege

When the sixth teenage suicide hit, Anne Einhorn, a Cherry Hill mother and school board member, remembers sitting helplessly in her kitchen as her son and his friends vented over why it kept happening.

The first was a girl, in 2000. The last one, an eighth grader, took his life, with no apparent warning, in the spring of 2004. "It was frightening," Einhorn said. "And it seemed they were getting younger as time went on."

The Cherry Hill school district wasn't going to wait for another. Last year, substance abuse counselor Jen DiStefano brought in a screening process -- one that's gaining ground in schools nationwide -- that tests students and picks up on suicidal tendencies and depression.

The mental health survey flagged 10 of the 68 kids who took it. Those 10 were referred for further assessment. "Those were kids we never would have known about," said DiStefano, whose district is one of at least six in New Jersey, including Livingston, using TeenScreen. Newark is considering it.

But the survey, offered to schools by Columbia University as part of a suicide prevention program, is under attack by groups on either end of the political spectrum whose members don't believe schools should give mental health checkups.

To the more than 450 schools and clinics nationwide that have signed on, it is a much-needed safety net for teens, who are good at concealing their distress.

To critics, it is an intrusion into a family's privacy. The groups fear TeenScreen's real mission is to push psychotropic drugs on teens -- a subject of increasingly intense debate as the number of children on medication soars.

The survey itself is a 10-minute question-and-answer test, ranging from 14 to 52 questions,

QUOTE: "...10-minute question-and-answer test, ranging from 14 to 52 questions,"

...and picked out 10 of 68 students as 'needing further testing'? Who, in the name of Davey Crockett's sweat-stained buckskins, would trust a half-fannied, dimwitted, Parade magazine, horsepoop smelling test like this?

"Survey Under Siege"? Really? Can't find a professional psychiatrist, psychologist, PLUMBER, even?

Fercryinoutloud.

Where's my mallet? Someone's gonna get whacked!

I'm really disgusted at the schools/government into the intrusion of our kids' lives. Here in PA, the schools are now going to start including the BMI on students' report cards (a calculation that determines ideal weight vs. obesity). For one, it's none of their damn business what my son's BMI is, and second, I don't need the school to tell me whether or not my son is overweight.

As for suicide prevention/pushing psychotropics, I have several thoughts on that. Too many people think that prescription drugs can make up for bad parenting; they can't. There are kids that do need some of these meds, but they are vastly in the minority. Having worked for almost 20 years around kids in both a psychiatric setting as well as a medical setting, I can say this with confidence. I have seen a recent trend to NOT prescribe SSRI's (anti-depressants such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc.), which is reassuring. There are a lot on meds for ADHD; sometimes it's appropriate, sometimes not.

Just the other day, one of the pediatrician's in our practice received the survey forms back from a teacher regarding one of the doc's patients (to eval for ADHD). The teacher filled it in much differently than the parent; if you look at the parent's survey, the child should be on meds (the mother specified that she wanted her son started on Strattera;what does that tell you?), yet the teacher's form indicated none of these behaviors; the child will not get the rx, and thus will not get the label of ADHD.

I think this proves that the impetus to start meds can be from EITHER the parent or the school, and sometimes from both. The doctor is certainly doing the right thing by PROPERLY EVALUATING the child before writing the script.

We're living in a much different world; many parents and schools just want to jam pills down their kids' throats to fix a problem, either real or perceived. With all of the meds we have, I wonder if, several decades from now, we'll see a lot of people with kidney and liver failure?

The degree of incompetence shown by the school counselors I have known and observed is astonishing. This does not matter until they get in over their heads in identifying kids in need of mental adjustment. We are talking about the dumbest of the dumb in a field of left wing kooks.

When you add this report to the earlier report last week that shrinks are going to identify "racist" social ideology as mental illness, you can see where this could go in your average public school of nitwits.

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