Speak out against TeenScreen! Please sign the following petition:  Stop TeenScreen's Unscientific and Experimental "Mental Health Screening" of American School Children

The following information was found on: psychsearch.net  To read their complete findings on TeenScreen & for more information on those behind the scenes, please click on the link above.

Click here for a list of links to other websites exposing the fraud of TeenScreen. Here you will also find a link that will keep you updated on the current locations of TeenScreen!

The Origin of TeenScreen:

TeenScreen was developed by psychiatrist David Shaffer, a drug company paid psychiatrist.  Shaffer is a consultant (see page 21 of this Executive Summary report) and apologist of pharmaceutical companies. Shaffer has served as an expert witness for various drug companies and a consultant on various psychotropic drugs.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention sent out a press release on May 8, 2000, that said Shaffer was their president and they had just released a national survey they had done on suicide. The funder of the survey? A pharmaceutical company. Shaffer's American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has also received $1,250,000 from yet another drug company.

Shaffer was one of the psychiatrists who had a hand in "developing" the thoroughly discredited DSM - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Psychiatry's Bible). In a National Public Radio interview, (August 18, 2003) Shaffer described the process:

"People (psychiatrists) would shout out their opinions from all sides of the room and whoever shouted loudest tended to be heard. My own impression, coming straight from England, was it was more like a tobacco auction than a sort of conference".

The National Academies scheduled a debate for Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006. The topic: "Screening for Mental Illness in Youth: Good Preventive Medicine?" David Shaffer was scheduled to debate Vera Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. Shaffer chickened out and cancelled his appearance. Ms. Sharav carried on without Shaffer. Sharav: "Dr. Shaffer, the architect of TeenScreen, and its promoters ceaselessly claim that evidence underlies mass screening efforts. If there is evidence, why has he refused to present it?" See Ms. Sharav debate the absent TeenScreen psychiatrist in this video.

What exactly is TeenScreen & what are the procedures?

TeenScreen is a very controversial so-called "diagnostic psychiatric service" aka suicide survey; done on school children who are then referred to psychiatric treatment. The evidence suggests that the objective of the psychiatrists who designed TeenScreen is to place children so selected on psychotropic drugs.

"It's just a way to put more people on prescription drugs," said Marcia Angell, a medical ethics lecturer at Harvard Medical School and author of "The Truth About Drug Companies." She said such programs will boost the sale of antidepressants even after the FDA in September ordered a "black box" label warning that the pills might spur suicidal thoughts or actions in minors. (The New York Post, December 5, 2004)
TeenScreen is based on the thoroughly discredited "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders".

The five step procedure leading up to children being "diagnosed" & drugged:

Step One:

TeenScreen lures kids as young as 9 years old into doing the suicide survey by offering them free movie passes, food coupons, "I completed TeenScreen" stress balls and pizza parties, if they consent to the procedure.

One tactic TeenScreen officials use is to sell the child on the suicide survey first and after they have the child's agreement, they later contact parents.

TeenScreen Project Coordinator, Kathleen Cigich, was quoted as saying: "We found early on, though, that sending out letters directly to parents is prohibitively time consuming and gets a low response rate. We thought, why not go to students themselves and offer a $5 video store coupon to anyone who brings back a parental consent form within a two-day turnaround period. It works. Our response rate is extremely high."

TeenScreen also utilizes a "passive consent" form which requires no written parental approval. The passive consent form is sent home to parents and if they don't return it TeenScreen considers that the parents approve. TeenScreen officials favor passive consent because they say it boosts their chances of screening kids to 95% as opposed to the written parental consent technique. What if the child forgets to bring the consent form home? What happens if the parent is too busy to refuse in writing? They've consented in the eyes of TeenScreen personnel.

Step Two:

The child is sat down and asked introverting questions such as:
Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren't interested in anything?
Has there been a time when you felt you couldn't do anything well or that you weren't as good-looking or as smart as other people?
How often did your parents get annoyed or upset with you because of the way you were feeling or acting?
Have you often felt very nervous when you've had to do things in front of people?
Have you often worried a lot before you were going to play a sport or game or do some other activity?
Have you tried to kill yourself in the last year?
Are you still thinking of killing yourself?
Have you thought seriously about killing yourself?
Have you often thought about killing yourself?
Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

Step Three:

Based on the answers the child gives to the above questions he is then shuffled off to a "clinician", who ponders the bogus label to use.

Social Phobia?

Panic Disorder?

Anxiety?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?
Active Suicide Ideation?

Passive Suicide Ideation?

Step Four:

The "clinician" summarizes his report and comes up with an "impairment score".

Step Five:

Based on how the child answered the "suicide survey", and which label the clinician conjured up and how the child did on his "impairment score" the child is then sent off for "treatment".

What treatment?

Drugs. A survey of recently trained child psychiatrists found the treatment for 9 out of 10 children consisted of drugging. (Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 2002)

The "treatment" used on children with these bogus labels can be found here: Medication Guidelines

"Treatment" is the long term goal for TeenScreen according to their director, Laurie Flynn.

What does the Food and Drug Administration say about these drugs? See here: Black Box Warning
Important Note to Parents:

Parents are being mislead by a multi billion-dollar a year child drugging industry that a diagnoses of "mental disorder" (ADHD, Bi-Polar, Social Anxiety Disorder) are medical diseases or illnesses. This is a fraud. No child has a brain scan, blood test, X-Ray or any evidence of physical abnormality to verify they are "ill" or "diseased."

Yet psychiatrists continue to pound the public with misleading and fraudulent statements that these so called mental disorders are biochemical or neurological conditions. That is false. They are simply a list of behaviors that psychiatrists vote into existence and insert into their billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

This has led to over 8 million children in the U.S. taking mind-altering psychiatric drugs.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM-IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), is psychiatry's billing bible of "disorders" from which psychiatric screening, diagnoses and their treatment are derived. The current edition lists 374 psychiatric conditions that have been identified as mental disorders.

Yet, the disorders contained in the DSM-IV are arrived at by consensus, not by scientific criteria. There are no blood tests, brain scans, X-Rays, MRIs or "chemical imbalance" tests that can scientifically validate any mental "disorder" as a disease or illness. Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen reports, "Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV are terms arrived at through peer consensus"- literally, a vote by APA committee members.
Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment
The PPRA is intended to protect the rights of parents and students in two ways. It seeks to ensure that schools make psychological surveys such as TeenScreen available for inspection by parents and seeks to ensure that schools obtain written parental consent.

TeenScreen says that if a local mental health screening program is approved by the Board of Education as part of the educational program, they are not required to get active parental consent under PPRA

The U.S. Department of Education says TeenScreen's statement is not right and says the question of whether "active" consent is required under PPRA is not based on whether the program is part of the school's education program. Rather, PPRA requires schools to obtain prior written consent ("active") before a student is required to take a survey that is funded by the U.S. Department of Education (in whole or in part) and that asks questions such as the above questions TeenScreen poses to children.
With all this said, TeenScreen shows no evidence of workability & child suicides are rare.
TeenScreen officials admit that there have been no studies that show that their program reduces suicide. That is not surprising, because the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force report of May of 2004 states:

A. There is no evidence that screening for suicide risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality.

B. There is limited evidence on the accuracy of screening tools to identify suicide risk.

C. There is insufficient evidence that treatment of those at high risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality.

D. No studies were found that directly address the harms of screening and treatment for suicide risk.

TeenScreen has no proof that their survey reduces suicide rates. The co-director of TeenScreen Rob Caruano, says that suicides are so rare that you'd have to screen the whole country to see a difference in mortality between screened and unscreened students.
TeenScreen's sales pitch constantly stated is that "Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death amongst children!" This is the tactic they use to gain sympathy from parents and school administrators and use this to create in the media, a suicide hysteria, when in fact child suicides are very rare. For instance in Florida, the number is 50 per year. Coincidentally, 50 is the same number of people who are struck by lightning each year in Florida. 50 out of close to 4 million children is not an epidemic.

Suicides are on the decline. Suicide among American youngsters and teens fell about 25 percent in the last decade. The suicide rate for ages 10 to 19 fell from 6.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 1992 to 4.6 per 100,000 in 2001, according to the Center for Disease Control. In 1991, 10 of 100,000 people in Florida ages 10-24 committed suicide. By 1999, that number had dropped to six out of 100,000.

Suicides generally have been on the decline since 1987. The rate of suicide for 19 years of age and younger is less now than in 1981, reaching their most recent highest peak in 1988.

The true story is that the majority of child suicides in Florida had been on psychotropic drugs or had already received psychiatric treatment, which is completely consistent with the recent flood of FDA and international warnings that these drugs can create suicidal ideation.

There is no epidemic of suicide in young people. The recent "suicide hysteria" is only the marketing strategy of the suicide "prevention" industry, ie the very controversial psychiatric based TeenScreen program.