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?
