No Child Left Un-medicated?

"A sweeping mental health initiative will be unveiled by President George W. Bush in July," reported the British Medical Journal on June 19. The administration’s "New Freedom Initiative" envisions "comprehensive mental health screening for ‘consumers of all ages,’ including preschool children."

According to the Presidential Commission on Mental Health: "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders." "There are good data showing that if you identify kids at an earlier age who are aggressive you can intervene … and change their trajectory," insists Dr. Graham Emslie, who helped develop a Texas pilot project on which the Bush administration proposal is based. The commission points out that schools are in a "key position" to screen 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at schools.

The pilot program, called the Texas Medication Algorithm (TMAP), was implemented under then-Governor George W. Bush. TMAP promoted the use of new, expensive antidepressant drugs to treat schoolchildren diagnosed with behavioral problems. Allen Jones, an official in Pennsylvania who helped implement that state’s version of the program, disclosed that "key officials with influence over the medication plan … received money and perks from drug companies with a stake in the medication algorithm."

Jones also points out that the same "political/pharmaceutical alliance" behind the TMAP was using the New Freedom Initiative "to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up the tab." As the British Medical Journal observes, "Bush is the clear frontrunner when it comes to drug company contributions," outstripping Kerry by more than four to one.

In totalitarian societies such as Soviet Russia and Communist Cuba, the state pathologizes dissent as a mental disorder. Mr. Bush’s proposal, in principle, would permit the same horrific abuses by putting Washington in charge of screening all schoolchildren — and, eventually, all other Americans.