It is an agenda coming down everywhere by the thought leaders.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32271786/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/
LINK
Until fairly recently, "people really haven't paid much attention to depressive disorders in children under the age of 6," said lead author Dr. Joan Luby, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis. "They didn't think it could happen ... because children under 6 were too emotionally immature to experience it."

www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/08/28/preschooler-depression.html
LINK
In the five-year study of 1,758 children born in Quebec and their mothers, 15 per cent of preschoolers suffered from atypically high levels of depression and anxiety, researchers reported in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

When they speak of "help" or treatment for the "ill" children, they mean drugs. Selling drugs for emotional troubles. Legal drugs OK, illegal drugs BAD hypocrisy.

Pharma Co is expanding its market to as far as it will go.

Who is going to stop it?

Win, win for Pharma. Kids traquilized and suffering from "help", need more drugs for their mental illness, kids who go crazy and do illegal actions is because of their mental illness. If only they had recieved more "help" in time.

I think that here in the US, to stop this it's going to have to come down to Congressional testimony about the still-developing nature of kids' brains, and how such prescribing off-label is effectively using kids as guinea pigs. Who will call such hearings?

I work for a private mental health clinic in western MA. We work closely with DCF and see many children here. The provisions of our state's so-called Children's Behavioral Health Initiative recently went into effect. It's bad enough that the orwellian concept of "behavioral health" has gained such widespread acceptance, but this monstrosity (CBHI) will make things much worse. It's net effect will be many more children receiving "services" (drugs). I'm thinking of one eight-year-old client of ours who is prescribed Adderal, Wellbutrin, Prozac, Risperdal, and Clonodine. He's developing tics and other involuntary movements and he walks around like a zombie. There will be many more like him. I've told my supervisor that I refuse to work with these cases, that I wont be part of this, that to prescribe drugs like these to children borders on the criminal. At least adults can make their own decisions regarding medication, even in the "progressive" state of Massachusetts. As for the daycare and pre-k mental health screening, I'm sure it's being driven by CBHI.

And again, no mention of the depressive effects of childhood abuse in a country in which one out of four women are molested before the age of 18. We don't know about the boys, haven't bothered to find out.

We are in MA, and so far we've avoided screening for our older daughter, and our youngest is still tiny. I'll let you know once we hit kindergarten. I tried to find concerted opposition to this bill to join up with, and failed (I know that doesn't mean it wasn't there, just that I couldn't find it). I contacted my representative directly. He requested to meet with me, and listened, and took notes, but it didn't do any good.

There is such a knee jerk response that more mental health care is "better" in more liberal circles. I'm a lefty on many things, but my views on this stuff put me dramatically out of step with many in my community.

Liamc -- If you (or anyone else) know of any local MA organizing pushing back on this, can you post here or contact me via my blog e-mail?

Screening in and of itself is should be a neutral thing - catching certain development difficulties with children, such as autism spectrum disorders at an early age can prove to be crucial for getting early intervention. I am wary about overmedication of kids, but we should keep that separate from mental health screening.

aumshantih,
I agree. Do you have any ideas how to accomplish this separation? I don't.

I'm not sure what separation would accomplish if not identifying kids for toxic drugging and stigmatizing. After all, if you identify a child who is anxious, I assume you'd want to treat that child in a compassionate way, presenting learning material in an engaging manner to help the child concentrate and learn. I'm not sure how any child would be harmed by being treated in a such a way. And then there's the "adhd" child and the "schizophrenic" child, as well as the "oppositional defiant child" - these three labels mean violent child. These kids need physical exercise as well as separation from objects that can be used as weapons. Again, all children should have exercise and avoid objects that can be used as weapons.

Screening isn't about identifying children to "help," it's about identifying children to segregate and neglect. The best of the studies of human compassion teach us how all people should be treated, not just a few.

All "screening," even well researched scientifically supported screening, comes with risks of false positives. Even if you believe that diagnosing mental illness is possible to do reliably in young children (which I do not believe), and even if you believe available diagnostic categories are useful, any screening effort will expose well children to largely unstudied medication risks. Those children will also be labeled for life. Once sucked into the "mental health system," for many it is nearly impossible to escape, and I'd hate to saddle any child with that through such a "neutral" screening effort.

(For the record, I also oppose several types of overused prenatal screening, which routinely expose women to undisclosed risks in the interest of "good prenatal care")

I am so worried about this. So worried.