POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC?
Judy Aron forwarded this long screed about mental health screening for kids. It’s typical for the genre– alarmist.
The Bush appointed New Freedoms Commission on Mental Health (NFC) is urging the implementation of wide-spread screening for children to identify and treat mental illness. It wants the TeenScreen to give all children a mental health check-up before graduation from high school.
Anti-Child drugging advocate, Ken Kramer, is dead-set against drugging children and therefore dead-set against TeenScreen. Kramer is an investigator for the Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog group.
After thoroughly investigating TeenScreen, which calls itself as a suicide prevention program, he has come to the conclusion that the program is a drug company marketing scheme to get more kids hooked into the psychiatric system and increase the customer base for psychotropic drugs.
Kramer is sponsoring a research project to investigate the circumstances of all child suicides in the state of Florida over the past 5 years. Although the data collection is in it’s infancy, Kramer says, the investigation so far has determined that between 2000-2004, 100% of children who committed suicide in Pasco County were either on psychotropic drugs or receiving psychiatric treatment.
He maintains that medicating kids with dangerous mind-altering drugs “is the real cause of high rates of teen suicide.” Kramer recently launched an informational TeenScreen website at http://www.psychsearch.net/teenscreen.html
The highlighted portion is just a bit misleading, no? By combining the two categories, we have no way of knowing if administering psychotropic drugs even has any correlation with suicide, much less being causative. For all we know, maybe only 1 percent of the kids were on anti-depressants or other psychotropics.
The rest of the piece is really not much better. Lots of heat but very little light.
7 Responses to “POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC?”
 Comment by Sam(antha) April 26th, 2005 at 10:20 am |
I am very sceptical of psychatric drugs. Of all of my friends and aquantices who have been on some sort of drug experienced very bad effects, with one friend (who was on the drugs for mild depression) trying to kill herself on several occassions. I’ve always been thankful that my sister, who has a lot of pychiatric problems, was never put on any of the drugs. A few of her pychs tried to have her put on them, but Mum fought them off. Perhaps the biggest problem with these sorts of drugs is they are tested on adults, not children or teenagers, and they can have some very different results on children + teens – often bad. Sorry for my appalling spelling, it’s after midnight and I’ve already turned into a pumpkin. |
 Comment by Gene April 26th, 2005 at 2:55 pm |
In the book “Listening to Prozac” the author states that the drug covers psychological scarring and gives the user a feeling of empowerment. The problem with this empowerment is that if the user was only thinking about taking their life, the drug would give them the nerve to do it. |
 Comment by Jema April 26th, 2005 at 3:39 pm |
While I believe that there is too little information available on the effects of psychiatric drugs on teens, I would agree that this article is tall on scare and short on logic. For instance, “100% of children who committed suicide in Pasco County were either on psychotropic drugs or receiving psychiatric treatment”. One could would think that children on psychotropic drugs or recieveing psychiatric treatment were already at higher risk for suicide than the general population. How many of these children would have attempted suicide with or without drugs? |
 Comment by Jema April 26th, 2005 at 3:41 pm |
Oops, please take out the “could” of the third sentence. I thought I had replaced it with would. |
 Comment by Karen E April 26th, 2005 at 7:06 pm |
I know several parents who are on Prozac or other drugs themselves who have made the decision to put their kids on Ritalin…what’s wrong with this picture? We don’t want people driving around drunk – why do we allow them to drive while on these medications? I know I can’t function if I take Benadryl. It would not surprise me to some day see mandatory mental health screenings in public schools. We already have scoliosis and body mass index programs in our Maryland county’s schools. Government intrusion sneaks up when people aren’t paying attention. |
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Comment by Gene April 27th, 2005 at 12:46 am |
Jema, The problem is that the drug gives them the courage to go through with it. |
 Comment by Sue April 30th, 2005 at 2:20 am |
Actually the reason for the FDA putting ““black box warnings”, the strongest possible warnings that can be issued, on certain antidepressants is that they have been linked to suicide ideations. In other words, suicidal thoughts occurred as a RESULT of the drugs. And so that you know the breakdown of the suicide statistics from Pascoe County, FL – 67% were on psych drugs. The remaining 33% are being investigated further as the reports were non-specific on drug use. So the 67% could rise as research continues. |