TeenScreen: Who Pays for Treatment and Drugs?

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TeenScreen: Who Pays for Treatment and Drugs?

ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP)
Promoting Openness, Full Disclosure, and Accountability
www.ahrp.org
 
 FYI

In her latest examination of the President''s Commission on Mental Health
recommndation for universal mental health screening, Evelyn Pringle focuses
on the $$$ it costs and on how screening, followed by prescribing
psychotropic drugs, is bankrupting of public health budgets:

 "The number one problem with the New Freedom Commission's recommendations
for mass mental health screening is the financial influence of the
pharmaceutical industry in the creation and implementation of programs like
TeenScreen, and the adoption of drug algorithms in each state that require
the use of expensive drugs. The fact is, the main customers for these
mandated drugs are the tax payers via the state Medicaid programs."

In her letter to the editor (Oct 31, 2004) AHRP board member, Dr. Karen
Effrem focuses on the dangerous overreaching nature of screening for mental
health, given the lack of precise screening tools, gtiven the absence of
safe and effective treatment for those who need it, and given the current
coercive policies that are endemic to public health initiatives.

Dr Effrem wrote:
"Whatever good may come from the other recommendations is completely
overshadowed by the loss of freedom and damage that would come from labeling
and drugging potentially millions of children based on these unsupportable
screening and treatment programs.

According to Effrem, "If we don't act now, every child in America will be
screened for mental illness: thousands, perhaps millions will be deemed "at
risk" of developing mental health problems for which they will be prescribed
powerful psychotropic drugs. The screening plan has been called Orwellian
and diabolical - the treatment "model" the report recommends is a drug
industry-sponsored guideline-- the Texas Medication Algorithm Project
(TMAP)."

Not surprisingly, every drug company involved in funding the creation the
TMAP model has drugs in one or more categories on the list."

Evidence has been found to dispute TennScreen Executive Director, Laurie
Flynn who claims TeenScreen is not funded by the government or drug
companies.

"TeenScreen has already sold its 10 minute computer administered screening
tool to a company called Multi-Health Systems, Inc. and starting in January
2006, TeenScreen sites will have to pay a fee."
"In addition, government funds and drug company money have been used to set
up TeenScreen programs in Ohio, Tennessee, and Florida."

 

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
212-595-8974
veracare@ahrp.org

http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=11041&fcategory_desc=Unde
r%20Reported
TeenScreen: Who Pays for Treatment and Drugs?
May 28, 2005
 By: Evelyn Pringle
Independent Media TV

Who will pay for the Bush-recommended mass mental health screening programs
like TeenScreen, and the follow-up treatment and drug therapy?

In the end, American tax payers will, for the most part.

According to the May 8, 2005 issue of Lab Business Week, a new analysis by
the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
reveals that Medicaid is now the largest single payer of mental health
services, exceeding private insurance, Medicare, or other state and local
spending.

The report notes that spending for patient care in psychiatric hospitals has
decreased, while expenses for prescription drugs, have increased. One out of
every 5 dollars spent on mental health care now goes for psychotropic drugs.

Bush established The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in 2002 by
executive order. The Commission recommends that all 50 states start testing
and treating mental disorders as early as possible, focusing on the nation's
52 million students, who can be easily accessed in the public school system.

The Commission's report recommends the use of a Texas-based project called
the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which is basically a list of
expensive drugs.

Launched in 1995, while Bush was Governor, TMAP was developed through an
"expert" consensus process that included the University of Texas, the state
mental health and prison systems, and representatives with strong financial
ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

The original TMAP model was funded through a grant from the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, an outgrowth of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical
giant, along with money from ten other drug companies.

Bogus Mental Illnesses

In order to successfully market their costly new drugs, the pharmaceutical
industry needed new mental illnesses. Thanks to their friends in the
psychiatric community, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental
Disorders (DSM), now lists over 350 mental disorders which are nothing but a
list of behavioral symptoms. The DSM is known as a psychiatrist's "billing
bible."

The disorders listed are not based on any scientific criteria. There are no
blood tests, brain scans, or chemical imbalance tests to verify that these
disorders are an actual disease.

Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, treatment and
prognosis, the disorders in the DSM are voted in by members of an American
Psychiatric Association committee. Illnesses voted in include ridiculous
labels like Caffeine-Related Disorder, Mathematics Disorder, Disorder of
Written Expression, and the all-encompassing Phase of Life Problem.

Who Needs TeenScreen?

TeenScreen has attempted to create a suicide hysteria in the media when the
truth is, suicide has been on the decline for over a decade. There is no
suicide epidemic among any age group let alone children.

Between 1992 and 2001, the suicide rate for kids ages 10 to 19 fell from 6.2
deaths per 100,000 people in 1992 to 4.6 per 100,000 in 2001, according to
statistics from the Center for Disease Control.

While the drug company funded team steps up efforts to set up mass screening
in schools across the country, critics are becoming more vocal. "The New
Freedom Commission is blatantly promoting the coercive and manipulative
tactics that have led to millions of children being falsely labeled with
mental disorders in our public schools," according to Peter Dockx, of the
Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, "Schools have become mental health
clinics where children are diagnosed based on subjective questionnaires,
instead of given proven educational solutions," he said.

"This fact was substantiated," Dockx said, "by a report from the President's
Commission on Excellence in Special Education, which found that 2.4 million
children had been diagnosed with mental 'disorders' and placed in Special
Education, when in fact these children had simply not been taught to read."

Plant The Seed - Make Kids Questions Their Own Sanity

TeenScreen is planting the seed of mental illness in the minds of children
by using loaded questions that make teens believe that normal everyday
feelings and thoughts are somehow abnormal. Here are a few questions from
the TeenScreen survey.

In the last year, has there been a time:

(1) When nothing was fun for you and you just weren't interested in
anything?

How many kids could say they enjoyed themselves and found life interesting
for 365 days in a row?

(2) When you couldn't think as clearly or as fast as usual?

Could any kids claim they were never confused in the past 365 days?

(3) When you had less energy than you usually do?

What does this mean? Less energy when? At school? At play? In the evenings?
In the morning? When? Geeeezz.

(4) When you felt you couldn't do anything well or that you weren't as
good-looking or as smart as other people?

How many adult could think back on their teen years and answer no to this
trick question?

(5) Have you often felt nervous or uncomfortable when you have been with a
group of children or young people - say, like in the lunchroom at school or
at a party?

Oh no, Susie thinks, I feel nervous in these settings and normal kids don't.

(6) Have you often felt very nervous when you've had to do things in front
of people?

Show me a kid who loves to stand up in front of people and I'll show you an
ego-maniac.

(7) Have you often worried a lot before you were going to play a sport or
game or do some other activity?

Does this mean its time to gather up all the little league pitchers who get
nervous on the mound and shoot them up with valium?

With its yes and no answers, this survey is a no-pass test and the prize for
flunkies will be a quick trip to the nearest drug store.

What normal kid has not felt all of the things above during the past year?
Kids who take this survey will forever question whether they are normal or
not. The seed will be planted.

Kids who answer yes to even some of these questions, will be referred to a
psychiatrist, diagnosed mentally ill and prescribed drugs. The idea will
then be planted in their minds that anytime they don't like the way the
feel, think, or act, all they have to do is take a pill.

TeenScreen provides a springboard into drug addiction.

The pill-pushers behind this scheme want to put kids on SSRI
antidepressants, even after the FDA has now determined, "A causal role for
antidepressants in inducing suicidality has been established in pediatric
patients."

In Pinellas County, Florida, information gathered in an ongoing
investigation by professional records researcher, Ken Kramer, supports the
FDA's warning. Kramer discovered that in 2002 and 2003, 81% of the teens who
committed suicide were either on psychotropic drugs or had received
psychiatric treatment.

Between 2000-2004, in Pasco County, the investigation disclosed that 100% of
the children who committed suicide were either on psychotropic drugs or had
received psychiatric treatment.

The truth is, antidepressants are ineffective and dangerous, and TeenScreen
does not lesson the rate of suicide among teens. A TeenScreen program was
implemented in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1997. Yet according to a 2003 Tulsa World
newspaper article, Mike Brose, the executive director of the Mental Health
Association in Tulsa, stated: "To the best of my knowledge, this is the
highest number of youth suicides we've ever had during the school year -- a
number we find very frightening."

Drug Company Ties

The number one problem with the New Freedom Commission's recommendations for
mass mental health screening is the financial influence of the
pharmaceutical industry in the creation and implementation of programs like
TeenScreen, and the adoption of drug algorithms in each state that require
the use of expensive drugs.

The fact is, the main customers for these mandated drugs are the tax payers
via the state Medicaid programs.

An October 31, 2004, letter to the editor in the Washington Times titled,
"Go Slow on Mental Health Screening", by pediatrician Dr. Karen Effrem, is a
powerful refutation of the New Freedom Commission chairman, Michael Hogan's,
defense of mass mental health screening of all school children with tax
dollars. Dr. Effrem writes:

"Given the very real problems of already existing coercion, subjective
criteria, dangerous and ineffective medication, and the failure of screening
to prevent suicide, none of which are covered in the NFC report, Congress
would be wise to withhold the $44 million requested for state grants to
implement the NFC recommendations.

"Whatever good may come from the other recommendations is completely
overshadowed by the loss of freedom and damage that would come from labeling
and drugging potentially millions of children based on these unsupportable
screening and treatment programs."

According to Effrem, "If we don't act now, every child in America will be
screened for mental illness: thousands, perhaps millions will be deemed "at
risk" of developing mental health problems for which they will be prescribed
powerful psychotropic drugs. The screening plan has been called Orwellian
and diabolical - the treatment "model" the report recommends is a drug
industry-sponsored guideline-- the Texas Medication Algorithm Project
(TMAP)."

Not surprisingly, every drug company involved in funding the creation the
TMAP model has drugs in one or more categories on the list.

Members of the panels who participated in the survey to decide which drugs
would be chosen were drawn from pools of candidates who were already on
record as supporting the new drugs.

A prime example of a member of the panel with ties to the drug companies is
Dr Karen Wagner. According to the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Wagner conducted a Pfizer-funded study and reported that
Pfizer's SSRI antidepressant drug, Zoloft, was safe, effective and well
tolerated in children.

Wagner made this convenient claim at a time when both the British Committee
on Safety in Medicines and the FDA had announced that they were re-examining
all SSRI clinical trial data.

Over the years, Wagner had received research funding from Abbott,
Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Forest Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline,
Organon, Pfizer, and Wyeth-Ayerst; served as a National Institute of Mental
Health consultant to Abbott, Bristol-MyersSquibb, Cyberonics, Eli Lilly,
Forest Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Otsuka, Janssen, Pfizer, and
UCB Pharma; and participated in speaker's bureaus for Abbott, Eli Lilly,
GlaxoSmithKline, Forest Laboratories, Pfizer, and Novartis, according to the
September 3, 2003 Drug News.

Drug News gave a caustic assessment of drug company influence on Wagner's
bogus study: "What we have here is a case study in how pharmaceutical
companies respond to warnings that their products cause harm."

"Earlier that summer British health authorities advised against treating
children under 18 with SSRI antidepressants because they trigger suicidal
thinking and actual suicide attempts," Drug News reported.

Budget Breaking Scheme

According to a 2003 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
prescription drug costs are the fastest-rising component of Medicaid
spending and they "are rising sharply because of increases in the number of
prescriptions used, increases in the prices of prescription drugs, and the
tendency for prescriptions to shift from older, less-expensive drugs to
newer, more-expensive ones."

National sales of antipsychotics reached $6.4 billion in 2002, making them
the fourth-highest-selling class of drugs, according to the New York Times
in May 2003. The Pharma tracking group, NDCHealth, reported that "more than
7.4 million prescriptions were written for Zyprexa and more than 7.6 million
for Risperdal in 2002."

Risperdal is the TMAP drug of choice for the treatment of schizophrenia
drug. Risperdal, costs nearly $500 a month. Multiply that by 7.6 million and
see why drug company profits are soaring.

The first TMAP model was adopted in Texas in 1995. By 1998, the state was in
dire financial straights. An article in the Abilene Reporter News on June
18, 1998 entitled "Medications' costs forces MHMR into rationing" described
the Texas system as "choking on the costs" of "new-generation medications
that treat schizophrenia, depression and bi-polar disorder."

The article described the need for emergency funding to pay for these drugs.
One official noted, "I believe that our (Mental Health) centers are in
crisis right now because they're trying to squeeze money out for these new
medications."

By 2002-2003 budget, Texas lawmakers had to increase the amount allocated
for health and human services by $1 billion with a significant portion of
that funding going for prescription drugs.

Because the drugs on these lists are the most expensive, profit-enhancing
drugs on the market, TMAP models are bankrupting state Medicaid programs all
over the country. (To read reports from Massachusetts, Florida, Texas,
Illinois, and for more information go to www.ahrp.org)

TeenScreen's promotional material claims its survey is free and the project
is not funded by the government or drug companies. However, according Ken
Kramer, "nothing is free." Kramer recently learned that TeenScreen has
already sold its 10 minute computer administered screening tool to a company
called Multi-Health Systems, Inc. and starting in January 2006, TeenScreen
sites will have to pay a fee.

In addition, government funds and drug company money have been used to set
up TeenScreen programs in Ohio, Tennessee, and Florida.

Last year, TeenScreen's Executive Director, Laurie Flynn, went before
Congress looking for money and asked lawmakers to divert funds from alcohol
and drug abuse programs to TeenScreen. If this wasn't so serious it would be
comical. This broad wants to take funding from drug abuse programs and use
it to implement a pill-pushing scheme.

So what happens to students who flunk the survey and don't have health
insurance or Medicaid to pay for the drugs?

Ken Kramer says, "Pull out your wallet school districts! TeenScreen
recommends that you apply for grants or secure funds to cover the services
needed by the teens."

By Evelyn Pringle epringle05@yahoo.com

(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative
journalist focused on exposing corruption)

Original Link: http://www.independent-media.tv

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