The Screeners are Screaming Again
Just when you thought that calls for ubiquitous mental health screening was winding down, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is calling for widespread depression screening for children.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is made up of 16 volunteer members who are supposed to be experts in prevention, evidence-based medicine, and primary care. Task Force members are appointed by the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to serve 4-year terms. AHRQ is a federal government entity which is supposed to work within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide research on health care.
In February, 2016, the USPSTF recommended repeated and widespread primary care mental health screening for “major depressive disorder” in children aged 12 to 18 years. The usual “treatment” is SSRI psychiatric drugs.
While they admit that “Medications for the treatment of depression, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have known harms,” they basically ignore the harms in order to push the screenings and the drugs.
Mental health screening is a test for so-called mental illness. A person who is screened and found to exhibit symptoms of mental distress can then be diagnosed with a mental “disease” or “disorder” and referred to a psychiatrist or psychiatric facility (or even to a General Practitioner) to be prescribed psychiatric drugs.
Mental health screening aims to get whole populations on drugs and thus under control. The kinds of drugs used create further medical and social problems, and these subsequent complications require additional taxes and laws to handle them. The net result is a sick and fearful population dependent on the government to “solve” all their problems.
Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.
Psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatric institutions, and other medical doctors prescribing psychiatric drugs and treatments must be made fully accountable for their funding, practices and treatments, and their results, or lack thereof — including prescribing antidepressants whose only results are harmful side effects.