Indiana Mental Health Plan moves forward, following in Illinois footsteps

by Rhonda Robinson

A mental health screening plan stating all Indiana children from birth to 22 years “shall” be screened survived the 11-1 vote yesterday.  The comprehensive plan was part of a law that was passed last year to reorganize all facets of services the state provides to children.   

Now Indiana is looking hard at the potential monster they have just created.

Sound familiar?
 

Illinois legislators also passed a bill in 2003 that they did not bother to read, or at least think through, and many admitted that they had no idea what they were signing on to at the time. 

It has become obvious that the mental health and pharmaceutical industry knew exactly what they were doing; creating jobs and opening new markets by targeting new mothers, their babies, all schoolchildren, beginning with those on public aid.

Indiana, like Illinois, began by presenting legislators with a bill to “help” children and fix a broken system. 

Only after it became law, the nuts and bolts of the plan were written, and the birth of a new bureaucracy was presented.

Meanwhile, here in Illinois, our own Orwellian monster, the Illinois Children's Mental Health Partnership, an entity that answers only to the governor, has just submitted their annual report to the governor: Strategic Plan for Building a Comprehensive Children's Mental Health System in Illinois.

While marginalizing parents as "key partners" in their mission, the Partnership states it has six main goals.

Goal I: Develop and strengthen prevention, early intervention, and treatment policies, programs, and services for children.
Goal II: Increase public education and awareness of the mental health needs of children.
Goal III: Maximize current investments and invest sufficient fiscal resources over time.
Goal IV: Build a qualified and adequately trained workforce with a sufficient number of professionals to serve children and their families throughout Illinois.
Goal V: Create a quality-driven children’s mental health system with shared accountability among key state agencies and programs.
Goal VI: Invest in research.

On the surface, it's tempting to shrug it off, saying, it is just another attempt to build jobs by spending tax  money--which it is.

But can we afford to shrug it off and hope it will just die for lack of funding?

In reality, we are in the process of building not only a new and vast bureaucracy to “help” the children of Illinois who have been subjected to the damaging results of the current failing and often dangerous educational system, and the abuse of the child welfare system; but will reach into every home.
 
But hey, its job security. 

The timing of the Illinois and Indiana plans are both interesting and suspect: both have emerged just before an election. 

A strategic move perhaps? Could it be they were counting on embarrassed lawmakers too ashamed to tell their constituents they just passed a law that trampled parental rights, and turned the minds of their children over to state examination, not to make a fuss?  And banking that lawmakers would not have the backbone to stand up and repeal a bad law?

Comments

[Carol Jenkins]

If we go to a mechanic to get our car fixed and he not only doesn’t fix it but makes it much worse and he does this with almost everyone, he is soon out of business. But, when the same thing is being done with our children, who do we go to in order to stop this madness? The government is supposed to be protecting the people yet it is supporting and encouraging mental health practitioners who are not only not curing anyone but are making the problems in our culture much worse and it’s obviously way out of control. If a mechanic has cars in his front yard that don’t work, you wouldn’t go to him. That’s not a good example. Psychiatry, as a profession, has the greatest number of suicides of any other profession. Is it any wonder that they actually prescribe drugs for kids who they “claim” (a large percentage being misdiagnosed) could be suicidal which actually have as a “side effect” possible suicidal thoughts? They set themselves up as authorities yet they set a horrible example. When are our politicians going to actually take a look at what is really there? This is not a science but the biggest and most successful scam ever run on the public.

[Tony Miller]

The Indianapolis Department of Education is suffering from a mass hysterical delusion to put it their friends terms OR there is some hidden corruption. I suspect the latter. Has anyone followed the money trail?

Since the vast majority of objective studies show psychiatry to be no more effective than a placebo it boggles the mind that they are allowed to screen children. Why? Someone in the department of education must define ‘help’ differently than I do. Doesn’t ‘help’ imply a ‘positive’ gain to the one being helped?

Did anyone at the Department of Education ask to see scientific proof of the effectiveness of screening to prevent suicide? Did they ask for scientific proof behind the labels that children will be asked to live with?

To answer no would be child abuse wouldn’t it?

This quote should be a hint “An Indianapolis psychiatrist with a doctorate in education and a concerned grandfather also spoke against the plan. A parent of three children with
diagnosed mental illnesses spoke in favor of it.”

I believe the parent of those three children and the task force would far better serve the well being of children by investigating psychiatry and the enormous profits pharmaceutical companies will earn by this cleverly crafted propaganda ploy.

[Susan Ryan]

Rhonda: "Could it be they were counting on embarrassed lawmakers too ashamed to tell their constituents they just passed a law that trampled parental rights, and turned the minds of their children over to state examination, not to make a fuss? And banking that lawmakers would not have the backbone to stand up and repeal a bad law?"

I can remember many IL lawmakers scratching their heads at what they had done when the public hearings started up about this plan for universal mental health screening, et al. Concerned parents were outraged. Headlines are gone and so is the outrage with the short attention span of the public. (I'm sure there's a pill for that disorder from one of these pharmaceuticals.)

Jerry Stermer of Voices For IL Children, (not my kids no matter what he says to legislators) routinely proclaims the "job creation" importance.
http://voices4kids.org
He can be that arrogant where it's not really "for the kids". Who's stopping him? Surely not our legislators.

[Tina]

Perhaps all of the american people are missing the point. Perhaps we are all not seeing what is the real problem not only with this law but with our society, law-making and law-makers in general. We live in a society that has conveniently chosen to forget who our Creator is and why we are here- we live in a society that has taken as many opportunities as possible to black- ball God from just about everything in our lives and then everyone just expects things to work out alright. Lawmakers have taken God out of our schools, and society has made it so that mothers cannot even afford to fulfill their God-given mission of staying home with their children and raising them in the fear and admonition of the Lord so that there will not be a need for psychiatric treatment or evaluation. A child who is brought up understanding God's word and ways will grow into a child and adult who will walk in His ways. all of this non-sense with pyschiatric evaluations and the government's involvement in areas that God never intended them to be involved in would cease if as a nation we would rise up and remember God. This I beleive is just another one of satan's plans to interfere with and destroy the institution of the family and we have to stop it. The government is out of control. We cannot allow under any circumstances for them to continue to try and take control of our children or our children's lives. We have to stop and say enough is enough - it's time we pray.