 
11/16/2004
MAKING PROGRESS,
BUT MORE ACTION NEEDED! TELL SENATE TO
“JUST SAY NO!” TO UNIVERSAL PSYCHIATRIC
SCREENING AND DRUGGING CHILDREN ------------------------------------------------- Thanks
in great measure to your efforts, we have made significant progress to stop
universal psychiatric screening for almost 60 million children, pregnant women,
and adults through schools and pre-schools that we warned you about last
week. Leadership
in the House of Representatives has now agreed to help us, and your letters last
week have brought a number of Senators on board as well. But we now need the support of four key
Senators: Sen. Spector
(R-PA)
202-224-4254, Sen. Stevens (R-AK)
202-224-3004 Sen. Harkin (D-IA)
202 224-3254 Sen. Frist (R-TN)
202-224-3344 Please call their offices and ask
them to make sure the omnibus spending bill or final committee report on
Labor/HHS appropriations includes the following language:
“None of the funds made available
for State incentive grants for transformation should be used for any programs of
mandatory or universal mental-health screening that performs mental-health
screening on anyone under 18 years of age without the express, written
permission of the parents or legal guardians of each individual
involved.” To
refresh your memory, the House has already voted to
appropriate $20 million for the scheme, and the Senate wants to bump it up to
$44 million as part of the omnibus appropriations bill they are working on this
week. Even if the Senate
passes some version of the funding, it will go to a joint Conference Committee
of both House and Senate members to hammer out the differences, so we can make
sure that this language is added to the final version. The bill would fund
initiatives of the “New Freedom Commission
on Mental Health,” including a program designed to subject every school age
child in this country to psychological testing and recommendations for
treatment. This is a dangerous
scheme that will heap even more coercive pressure on parents to medicate
children with potentially dangerous side effects. Further, even the government’s own task
force has concluded that mental health screening does little to prevent
suicide. Click here to read news
story from NewsMax.com.
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