< Changing Worldviews.Commentary >

Words are powerful - Thoughts shape - Ideas have consequences

Rhonda Robinson

Journalist, Illinois Leader
Posted November 15, 2004

Fishing allowed in schools
Creating a new marketplace for drugs

Last year, Texas enacted a law to prohibit schools from attempting to diagnose and label children.

This past July, New York State launched a major lawsuit against several of the largest pharmaceutical companies for misleading doctors about the risks of anti-depressants (among other charges).

Just this August, Illinois prepares to cast the largest pharmaceutical fishing net into our public school system.

School districts had to submit to the ISBE their new policy to ensure compliance with the new Children’s Mental Health Act. The Act also created “Children’s Mental Health Partnership” which is mandated to recommend new measures that ensure mental health screening for children from age 0 through adolescence at 18.

The current recommendations also encompass the screening of pregnant women before delivery for depression, with follow-up, in-home visits to the new family.

Allen Jones, a former Investigator in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General (OIG), Bureau of Special Investigations, who has been watching this type of initiative across the country, told the IllinoisLeader.com in an investigative report,

“The Illinois Children’s Mental Health Act, is the tip of an insidious iceberg. The pharmaceutical industry is gaining back-door access to all of our children by compromising key decision makers and by gaining rubber-stamped endorsements of groups like the ICMHP (Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership.)”

The pharmaceutical industry has been quietly grooming Illinois to become a national model for state-mandated “implementation of evidence-based practices screening” for emotional and social disorders for all children.

The industry funds research to establish “task forces” like the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Task Force, which produced the initial report, by which our new law was based on.

New drugs that don’t fare well in the clinical trials, but still hold patents, needed a marketing strategy. Because drug manufacturers do not have to disclose to physicians or the public the entire negative results in their research, they could create a new system of recommendations called “evidence-based practice.”

Which is based on “expert consensus,” which means that it is the opinion of some experts that the drug is safe and/or well tolerated.

How does this new policy affect our schools here in Illinois?

The implementation of evidence-based practice screening for emotional and social disorders for our children will inevitably create a new marketplace within our schools. When you are working with something as subjective as the emotional and behavioral development of children, which is open to interpretation, the stage is set for over-prescribing of medications.

Dr.Kruszewski, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Penn State, who has been vocal in his efforts to prevent abusive misprescribing in children, explains, “Inappropriate prescribing makes things worse, not better. The risk-to-reward ratio of an ineffective drug that is injudiciously evaluated and promoted is lopsided in favor of producing more problems, not less.

"What may look like a short-term beneficial response from a pill can mask the intermediate and long-term problems that develop because of it---problems such as obesity, diabetes, and alterations in blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, seizures, drug dependence and withdrawal, neurological sequelae, cardiac arrhythmias.

"That's a partial list. More importantly, medications often undermine and/or thwart the developmental learning skills that are required of a person to deal with routine problems of living and absolutely essential to handle future life difficulties.”

“Evidence-based practice” (which we find referenced throughout the Partnership’s preliminary plan for our children) is best illustrated by Howard G. Hendrick’s story of the Scientist and the Flea.

A scientist using this method while observing the characteristics of the common flea began by commanding the flea to jump. So it did. He then pulled one leg off the flea and shouted the command again; still the flea complied. Again, the scientist pulled another leg off, although it was obviously more difficult to jump, the flea still managed to obey.

One by one the scientist removed the legs of the flea, and time and time again, the flea jumped as feebly as one might expect, but nonetheless, it jumped. Until that is, the last leg was removed.

The scientist ordered the flea to jump, but nothing happened. The scientist shouted the command, but to no avail; the flea did not budge. The scientist concluded his study, by writing in his journal his findings. “When the legs of a flea are removed, he loses his sense of hearing.”

Moral of the story; What one finds, is most often, exactly what he is looking for.

© Rhonda Robinson 2004 Reprinted with Permission

Rhonda Robinson, is a central Illinois correspondent for the Illinois Leader, a conservative online news source, and her weekly column Across the Fence also appears in the Regional, giving a frank and sometimes-humorous commentary on the social, political and everyday issues affecting family life. Rhonda is a wife, a home schooling mother of nine and grandmother of six.
Her articles can be read at www.illinoisleader.com www.moultriedouglas.com Contact: Rhonda@illinoisleader.com