Health

TeenScreen causes suicide

By Evelyn Pringle
Online Journal Contributing Writer

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May 24, 2005�TeenScreen causes suicide? How?

This pharmaceutical industry backed pill-pushing scheme cons school kids into taking a survey full of loaded questions and then uses the results to convince parents that their kids need to be on dangerous mind-altering drugs that have now been linked to suicide and other violent acts in children.

Enough cannot be said when it comes to the power of mental persuasion with kids. All children feel lonely, depressed, like they don't fit in, like they are different than others, like they are not smart enough, good-looking enough, or popular enough at one time or another. This is normal thinking for all adolescents.

The TeenScreen pill-pushing squad takes advantage of normal and vulnerable kids when it goes into schools with a survey that is loaded with questions about these normal notions and feelings, forever planting in these kids minds that such thoughts are abnormal.

The survey phrases questions calculated to produce one answer, yes. It asks whether you have ever felt this way or that way?

Sure kids have negative thoughts sometimes, but they don't dwell on them and they usually pass as quickly as they came. However, after taking a survey that suggests that these feelings are abnormal, kids will dwell on them. Because according to the promoters of TeenScreen, if they ever feel this way they are not normal.

So next thing you know, Susie and Tommie go running to a teacher and say, �You know, now that you mention it, I do have these feelings, I must be mentally ill.�

Mission accomplished. It's that easy.

Just like that, the scheme nets two new customers for the pharmaceutical industry. All the survey had to do was plant the idea in Susie and Tommie's mind.

In the words of anti-drugging advocate Ken Kramer, "So even the kids who are not tested "positive" on TeenScreen get sent to the shrinks because the booby trap has been set up to catch them later!"

Ken gets it.

Then its time for step two of the scheme. Although Tommie and Susie are hooked, they still have to convince Mom and Dad to hurry to the drug store to purchase some very expensive (but magic) pills to keep Susie and Tommie from committing suicide.

And if Mom and Dad won't agree to put their kid on drugs, they will be accused of being horrible parents, surely guilty of neglect, for not caring about saving their poor suicidal children.

So in the end, often against their better judgment, Mom and Dad buy the pills. This is where the danger lies. Tommie starts taking the drugs, goes out and does something really crazy, like shooting up a classroom or killing his parents, and ends up in prison.

Next thing you know, Tommie thinks to himself, I am not only nuts, I am a horrible rotten person and hangs himself in his jail cell.

How often does something like this happen in real life? Too often.

Its time to start placing the blame for the rise in teen suicide where it belongs: on the greedy bastards involved in programs like TeenScreen, who invent schemes to get our kids hooked on these dangerous drugs in the first place.

They are murderers.

Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government. She can be reached at epringle05@yahoo.com.