Lawsuits Against Mental Screening Begins

TeenScreen - The Law Suits Begin

The scheme concocted by the pharmaceutical industry
and pushed forward by the Bush administration to
screen the entire nation's public school population
for mental illness and treat them with controversial
drugs was already setting off alarms among parents all
across the country. But in the state of Indiana, the
alarm just got louder.

Tax payers had better get out their check books
because school taxes are about to go up as the law
suits against school boards start mounting over the
TeenScreen Depression survey being administered to
children in the school.

The first notice of intent to sue was filed this month
in Indiana by Michael and Teresa Rhoades who were
outraged when they learned their daughter had been
given a psychological test at school without their
consent.

In December 2004, their daughter came home from school
and said she had been diagnosed with an obsessive
compulsive and social anxiety disorder after taking
the TeenScreen survey.

Teresa Rhoades always viewed her daughter as a happy
normal teenager. “I was absolutely outraged that my
daughter was told she had these two conditions based
off a computer test,” said Rhoades.

Attorney John Price, who is representing the
Rhoadeses, confirmed that he had sent a notice of tort
claim to both the school and Madison Center, which
worked with the school system to administer the test.

This action means that the Rhoadeses are declaring
their intent to file a lawsuit against both entities.
Price said state law requires a notice of claim to be
sent to any governmental agencies, including schools,
before a lawsuit can be filed against them, according
to the June 9, South Bend Tribune.

In the notice, Teresa and Michael Rhoades claim the
survey was erroneous, improper, and done with reckless
disregard for their daughter's welfare and that they
did not give the school permission to give the test.

The parents allege that when their daughter took the
test, she was improperly diagnosed with obsessive
compulsive disorder and social anxiety disorder. That
diagnosis, they claim, caused both the teen and her
parents emotional distress, and the family intends to
seek the "maximum amount of damages."

The Indiana child was diagnosed with two disorders in
one crack but there are many more.

If a teen doesn't like doing math assignments, parents
should not worry. TeenScreen may determine that the
child simply has a mental illness known as
developmental-arithmetic disorder.

There's also a diagnosis for those children who like
to argue with their parents, they may be afflicted
with a mental illness known oppositional-defiant
disorder.

And for anybody critical of the of the above 2
disorders, they may be suffering the mental illness
called noncompliance-with-treatment disorder.

No kidding, these illnesses are included in the more
than 350 "mental disorders" listed in the American
Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, the insurance billing
bible for mental disorders.

Tax Dollars Already Being Funneled To Pharma

In addition to lawsuits, tax dollars are already
funding TeenScreen and many of the drugs purchased by
the new customers it recruits.

While promoting TeenScreen to Congress, its Executive
Director, Laurie Flynn, flat out lied when she told
members of congress that TeenScreen was free and its
website statement that "The program does not receive
financial support from the government and is not
affiliated with, or funded by, any pharmaceutical
companies," is also a blatant lie.

On Oct 21, 2004 Bush authorized $82 million for
suicide prevention programs like TeenScreen and a
report in Psychiatric Times said the administration
had proposed an increase in the budget for the Center
for Mental Health Service from $862 million in 2004 to
$912 million in fiscal 2005. TeenScreen is sure to get
a cut of those tax dollars.

Federal tax dollars are also being funneled through
state governments to fund TeenScreen. On Nov 17, 2004,
Officials at the University of South Florida
Department of Child & Family Studies said $98,641 was
awarded to expand the TeenScreen program in the Tampa
Bay area.

In Ohio, under the governor's Executive Budget for
2006 and 2007, the Department of Mental Health has
specifically earmarked $70,000 for TeenScreen for each
of those years, reports investigator Sue Weibert.

On June, 2002 the Update Newsletter published by the
Tennessee Department of Mental Health, reported that
170 Nashville students had completed a TeenScreen
survey. The Newsletter said the survey was funded by
grants from AdvoCare and Eli Lilly. Last I knew, Eli
Lilly was a pharmaceutical company.

The great news for Pharma was that 96 of the 170
students who took the survey ended up speaking to a
therapist which no doubt resulted in the recruitment
of 96 new pill-popping teens.

Tax Dollars Spent On Drugs

Unbeknownst to many, tax payers are already paying an
enormous price as a result of marketing schemes
designed to get students hooked on antipsychotic
drugs. A list of drugs that must be prescribed for
kids is already set up, modeled after a list used in
Texas since 1995 called the TMAP. The list contains
the most expensive drugs on the market.

In 2002, national sales of antipsychotics reached $6.4
billion in 2002, making them the
fourth-highest-selling class of drugs, according to
IMS Health, a company that tracks drug sales, in the
May 2003, New York Times. By 2004, sales had jumped
by over $2 billion with antipsychotics sales totaling
$8.8 billion -- $2.4 billion of which was paid for by
state Medicaid funds, according to the May/June 2005
issue of Mother Jones Magazine.

Here's how this part of the scheme works. The drug
companies bribe state officials and donate money in
the form of "educational grants" to the states to
approve and implement these TMAP drug programs, and
then in return, state Medicaid programs fund the cost
of the drugs with tax dollars.

For instance, in Texas, Pfizer awarded $232,000 in
grants to the Texas department of mental health to
"educate" mental health providers about TMAP, and in
return, the Texas Medicaid program spent $233 million
tax dollars on Pfizer drugs like Zoloft.

Johnson & Johnson (Janssen Pharmaceutica) gave grants
of $224,000 to Texas and Medicaid spent $272 million
on J & J antipsychotic drug, Risperdal.

Eli Lilly awarded $109,000 in grants to "educate"
state mental health providers and as a result, Texas
Medicaid spent $328 million for Lilly's antipsychotic
drug Zyprexa.

The TMAP was approved in Texas in 1995, and by
February 9, 2001, an article in the Dallas Morning
News, titled State Spending More on Mental Illness
Drugs reported: “Texas now spends more money on
medication to treat mental illness for low-income
residents than on any other type of prescription
drug.”

In addition to covering nearly 40% of the drugs for
Medicaid recipients, the state also spends about
another $60 million a year on "hundreds of thousands
of prescription drugs for other state-funded programs
at the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental
Retardation and the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice,” the paper reported.

By the time the 2002-2003 budget was established,
Texas lawmakers had to increase the amount of money
allocated to the department of health and human
services by $1 billion with a significant portion
earmarked for prescription drugs, according to Texas
officials.

In 1999, Ohio adopted its version of TMAP and by 2002
Ohio's Medicaid program was spending $145 million on
schizophrenia medications alone.

California spent over $500 million on the Atypicals
Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroqual in 2003.

In 2002, Missouri Medicaid spent $104 million on three
TMAP drugs alone. The three topped the list of all
other medications covered by Medicaid, including HIV,
cancer, and heart drugs.

Chickens Come Home To Roost

Pennsylvania taxpayers are now saddled with PennMap,
its own version of the Texas list of expensive drugs,
for the treatment of mentally ill, as a result of a
the pharmaceutical scheme used to infiltrate public
institutions and influence state officials and
treatment practices.

It has since been revealed by whistleblowers Allen
Jones and Stefan Kruszewiski that the Pennsylvania
officials who approved the drugs for PennMap were
receiving improper or illegal financial rewards from
drug companies involved in promoting the program.

Dr Stefan Kruszewski was hired as a psychiatric
consultant for the Pennsylvania Department of Health
and Human Services. He was in charge of the state's
mental health and substance misuse programs to protect
against fraud, waste, and abuse. He was fired after
he uncovered corrupt relations between Pennsylvania
politicians and pharmaceutical representatives and has
since filed a Whistleblower suit against the state.

Allen Jones was an employee of the Pennsylvania Office
of the Inspector General, and revealed that state
officials with influence over the PennMap program
received financial benefits from drug companies that
had a stake in getting PennMap accepted. Jones was
fired after he made his discoveries known to the BMJ
and the New York Times when his superiors ordered him
to stop his investigation. He also has filed a
Whistleblower suit.

Well, it looks like the chickens have finally come
home to roost in Pennsylvania.

One of the officials that Jones named was Steven
Fiorello. On April 15, 2005 the Associated Press
reported that Pennsylvania's top pharmacist repeatedly
took money from Pfizer and other outside sources,
violating ethics laws, a government panel found.

The State Ethics Commission fined Fiorello more than
$27,000 and referred the case to the state attorney
general's office for possible criminal prosecution.

The commission cited repeated conflicts between
Fiorello's unofficial activities and his official
duties, which included serving on a panel that decides
which drugs may be given to patients at the nine state
mental hospitals. The report also cited repeated
failures to disclose his income from drug companies,
Pfizer and Janssen, and other outside sources.

It seems Fiorello became a member of Pfizer's
"advisory council'' around the same time he joined the
PennMap panel. The council held annual meetings,
apparently "to solicit input from health-care
professionals to help Pfizer define its commercial
strategies for its products," the commission said in
the report.

The ethics committee also discovered a "Medical
Director's Education Account," which was funded by
unrestricted educational grants from pharmaceutical
companies and that Fiorello himself had solicited
funds for the account.

It was recently announce that these "educational"
grants that have benefited state officials who were in
positions to approve the TMAP lists are finally going
to be investigated by a senate committee.

On June 10, 2005, Senators Chuck Grassley and Max
Baucus issued a Press Release that said they have
asked a number of large drug makers to explain a
marketing practice where the companies give money to
state governments and other organizations in the form
of grants. The drug companies call the awards
educational grants, but the senators are concerned
that the dollars are more focused on product promotion
than education, the release said.

Grassley is chairman and Baucus is ranking member of
the Senate Committee on Finance, which has legislative
and oversight responsibility for the Medicare and
Medicaid programs.

In addition, on June 9, 2005, the senators sent a
letter to drug companies that states in part, "The
Committee seeks further information on this topic so
that it can assess how educational grants are used, in
what contexts and for what purposes, and who receives
them."

It was sent to the following drug makers: Pfizer,
GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co,
AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, Bristol-Myers Squibb,
Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Wyeth
Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Eisai,
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Schering-Plough
Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Forest Pharmaceuticals,
Abbott Laboratories, Genentech, Biogen Idec, Genzyme
Corporation, Chiron Corporation, Serono, and TAP
Pharmaceutical Products.

The Senators said their inquiry is based on reports
that some companies have awarded these grants to
health care providers as inducements to those
providers to prescribe medications the companies
produce. In other cases, such grants to state agencies
may have prompted those agencies to develop programs
leading to over-medication of patients at the expense
of patient health or to unnecessary expense for
taxpayers.

"We need to know how this behind-the-scenes funneling
of money is influencing decision makers," Grassley
said, "The decisions result in the government spending
billions of dollars on drugs. The tactics look
aggressive, and the response on behalf of the public
needs to be just as vigorous."

This committee was needed because Pennsylvania is
merely the tip of the iceberg. Many of the same
tactics have been used in other states like Florida
with Jim McDonough, Director of the Florida Office of
Drug Control, who is listed as an “advisor” to
TeenScreen on its website. TeenScreen gifted
McDonough's office with $180,000 to get TeenScreen set
up.

However, Executive Director, Laurie Flynn, is now
crying foul because she doesn't feel the money has
been put to good use since McDonough failed to get the
program in all the schools as promised, in large part
because he met his match in Ken Kramer.

In Ohio there's Mike Hogan, Director of the Ohio
Department of Mental Health. He's hooked in with
Parexel Medical Marketing, a front group that takes
Pharma money to set "advisory panels" for Pharma. The
panel memberships are made up exclusively of Mental
Health, Medicaid and other Directors from the various
states. Michael Hogan is listed as an advisory board
member.

The panel members are treated to trips, first class
accommodations and other perks in exchange for showing
up and listening to a spiel by Janssen sales personnel
who direct the course of the meetings. The same kinds
of meetings that Fiorello attended.

Hopefully will be just a matter of time before the new
senate committee disbands this gang of pharma-backed
government pill-pushers.

Trying To Save The Children

Dire warnings against mass mental health screening are
coming from every segment of society, including
parents, physicians, academics, journalists, and human
rights groups because the influence of the
pharmaceutical industry in this scheme is so patently
obvious.

People are particularly worried about saving the
children from senseless and dangerous drugging.
According to long-time anti-child drugging advocate,
Doyle Mills, "Psychiatry has a long history of abject
failure. Psychiatric treatments - drugs,
electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies - have harmed
millions and robbed them of any hope of a normal
life."

Expert records researcher, Ken Kramer, has been
fighting against child drugging for years has
conducted a research project on child suicides in
Florida that determined that medicating kids with the
types of dangerous mind-altering drugs on these lists
is causing suicide. He helped defeat TeenScreen's
attempt to gain access to schools in 2 of Florida's
largest counties. Ken has a TeenScreen website at
http://www.psychsearch.net/teenscreen.html

Dr Karen Effrem, a pediatrician and strong opponent of
mandatory screening recently warned, "Universal mental
health screening and the drugging of children ...
needs to be stopped so that many thousands if not
millions of children will be saved from receiving
stigmatizing diagnoses that would follow them for the
rest of their lives. America's school children should
not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and
dangerous medications based on vague and dubious
diagnoses."

In a letter to the editor in the Washington Times on
October 31, 2004, Effrem summed up the dangers of
using tax dollars to fund mass mental health screening
of children:

"Given the very real problems of already existing
coercion, subjective criteria, dangerous and
ineffective medication, and the failure of screening
to prevent suicide ... Congress would be wise to
withhold the $44 million requested for state grants."

The nation's first law suit has been filed and let it
serve as a warning to other schools across the country
to think twice before allowing the TeenScreen
recruitment scheme to zero in on their students.

Evelyn Pringle
epringle05@yahoo.com

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