Legislation Filed to Prevent "Mandatory Psychological Screening" of Children
I never thought it would come to this, and I am not a fan of Ron Paul. But... Paul and others have introduced H.R. 2218, called the "Parental Consent Act." The purpose of the bill is to prevent children from being subjected to mandatory mental-health screening without the express, written, voluntary, informed consent of their parents or legal guardians. From the bill:
(a) Universal or Mandatory Mental Health Screening Program--No Federal funds may be used to establish or implement any universal or mandatory mental health, psychiatric, or socio-emotional screening program.We already have children being given birth control and abortions without parental consent, and I understand, even psychotropic drugs. And here's something I thought I would never write at SHS--From Paul's speech introducing the bill:
(b) Refusal To Consent as Basis of a Charge of Child Abuse or Education Neglect--No Federal education funds may be paid to any local educational agency or other instrument of government that uses the refusal of a parent or legal guardian to provide express, written, voluntary, informed consent to mental health screening for his or her child as the basis of a charge of child abuse, child neglect, medical neglect, or education neglect until the agency or instrument demonstrates that it is no longer using such refusal as a basis of such a charge.
(c) Definition--For purposes of this Act , the term `universal or mandatory mental health, psychiatric, or socio-emotional screening program; (1) means any mental health screening program in which a set of individuals (other than members of the Armed Forces or individuals serving a sentence resulting from conviction for a criminal offense) is automatically screened without regard to whether there was a prior indication of a need for mental health treatment;
The New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has recommended that the federal and state governments work toward the implementation of a comprehensive system of mental-health screening for all Americans. The commission recommends that universal or mandatory mental-health screening first be implemented in public schools as a prelude to expanding it to the general public. However, neither the commission's report nor any related mental-health screening proposal requires parental consent before a child is subjected to mental-health screening.I had never heard of the Commission on Mental Health. Here it is, established by President Bush, no less.
The idea that Americans should all have routine mental health screenings is, pardon the pun, nuts. Whatever the motive for the recommendation, it would eventually be about calling people with politically incorrect views and attitudes a "mental health problem." (For example, political conservatism has been called a mental illness.)
Alas, it seems to me that preventing mandatory mental health care screening for kids who have no indication of disturbance, is, in this day and age necessary. The fact that the bill almost surely has no chance of passage proves the reasonableness of the concern.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:13 AM
33 Comments
33 Comments:
Gee, Wesley, I guess you'd rather have people like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy running around loose and acting out their fantasies, than identifying and interdicting them while they're still in grade school. I can tell, you have an enormous amount of respect for human life.
History Writer: The Left is about power, not freedom. Do you really think we all should be given mental health tests? Mandatory? Really?
Oh, Please, history writer. Your point feeds into the cultural belief that Bundy and Dahmer were mentally ill. They showed no indication of mental illness. Rather,they chose to do evil things. People have fantasies all the time, even violent ones, that they do not act on. Moreover, this has nothing to do with mental illness. Stop spreading lies about those with mental illnesses.
Good point, SAFEpres.
The money for this program should be diverted to programs that help treat children and adults who are diagnosed with mental illnesses that aren't covered by the person's or family's insurance (or Medicaid/Medicare).
These people need help. They're desperate for it and not getting it - and their options are dwindling by the day. Private insurance coverage for treatment of severe mental illness is spotty; Medicaid is inadequate; county and state governments look the other way and hope these people and their problems will just disappear.
Mandatory _government_ screening of schoolchildren won't meet the real need, and it certainly has the potential to be used as a political tool.
Absolutely, Kathleen. I agree. Why isn't the government addressing that problem?
SAFEpres: Really? You mean it WASN'T psychopathic of Ted Bundy to rape, torture, murder and mutilate 30 (at least, probably more) women whose only offense was to resemble someone whose body size and hairstyle triggered nasty feelings? You consider that not psychotic? How about Dahmer storing and eating parts of his victims? Perfectly OK, just misguided? You can't be serious, unless you're thinking of having the medical profession scrap the DSM and start practicing witchcraft. Wait, don't tell me: you believe in "demonic possession" and "satanic influences"?
Wesley: We're not talking about "all of us:" we're talking about children in elementary school. No, it's not "Big Brother." You don't object to immunizing them against measles, whooping cough and smallpox, do you? How about vision testing and hearing testing in school? Those are OK, aren't they? So what objection could any reasonable person have to administering a battery of standard psychiatric tests to identify the mentally ill at an early age? I hope you're not going to tell me that there's no such thing as mental illness in children, and that for some it's their "chosen lifestyle" to be little sociopaths. Or that diagnostic testing of children doesn't work. Please, no. As I see it your sole objection is that psychiatric testing is somehow "invasive" while other kinds of tests aren't. How do you explain this as an ethical matter? Do you believe it's fine to expose kids to little up-and-coming psychos? Believe me, Wesley, I know whereof I speak. I went to elementary school with Frank Terpil. He was crazy as a bedbug when he was ten, and wherever he's hiding out from Interpol you can bet he's crazy as a bedbug still. He was a terror to be around. Liked to torture small animals. Look him up on the web if you're not familiar with the name. During his career he worked for both Idi Amin and Qadaffi. The world would definitely be a better place if they had lobotomized the little bastard back in the 1940s.
History Writer: I don't object to vaccines for communicable diseases. Mental health is not nearly the same thing.
And where are you going to get the $? We can't even teach kids how to read anymore, and this kind of social engineering is a huge part of the problem.
I am not a fan of Ron Paul. But... but I'm going to praise his actions..
Whats not to like about Ron Paul?
This man has written the most pro conservative bills of any Representative. He is one of the only Reps who isn't bought and sold on a regular basis.
Not to mention that he understands sound economic advice and was jeered by fools like Mitt Romney and Guiliani in the Presidential debates for saying America was heading straight into an economic crisis in 2007 - and he has delivered thousands of babies...
HistoryWriter, I have to ask, do you have children in the public school system? I'm fighting a constant battle with them over who actually parents my child.
To give a brief example, late last year I had a run in with my daughter's teacher. The stomach flu (Norwalk) circulated around my family and the school. This virus is particularly nasty as you do not develop an immunity to it - so a single person can be infected and reinfected over and over again. After the fourth run in we had with it, and my daughter missed school for nearly 8 days, I finally sent her back with a bare bones lunch - apple juice, saltine crackers and a few carrot sticks. Her teacher forced my daughter, against my express, written instructions, to purchase a hot lunch, which later in the day resulted in more stomach symptoms. The reasoning? "The State of Illinois says that lunch is not appropriate for a child." Frankly, the State of Illinois can shove it up their collective rears.
It is not alarmist to insist that the State stay out of my child's life. Required "mental health screenings" are simply fronts for interrogating children about the fitness of parents [does Mommy every spank you?], discovering potential "aberrant behavior" [your teacher said you don't pay attention in class] and diagnosing buzz illnesses such as "ADD" [which leads to mandatory prescriptions to create a herd of passive school children]. Many public schools have done/are doing this already. 18 years ago I was diagnosed as "ADD" and my parents were pressured to put me on a "5 day on 2 off/9 month on 3 off" schedule for Ritalin (guess which months and days were what!). Luckily, they refused.
We are a nation of laws or freedom. We don't preemptively label someone. The idea that either Dahmer or Bundy could have been diagnosed as killers as children is ludicrous. Sociopaths are infrequently diagnosed, as they do not want to be.
Paul is a libertarian, and I am not.
As far as the immunizations and sight/hearing tests, these are cut and dry measures. There are no social worker laden questions involved with "can you see the little box" or "press the button when you hear the beep". Mandatory immunizations are required to prevent the spread of communicable diseases - also quite cut and dry. A social worker can justify saying "are you happy with your parents" in a mental health screening, but a nurse can't justify that type of question while giving an immunization. Take a look at the UN's children's bill of rights. This point to what an anti-freedom state wants : complete governmental control of how we raise our children. Parents have no power - they simply provide the cash for food, clothing and housing.
I think this screening thing fits into a problem our society has with thinking about all things medical. I call it "the cancer model." American society (and probably Western society generally) has come to believe that everything is like cancer. How so? Well, we have come to think that every possible problem that anyone could think of as "medical"--now including the notoriously slippery category of mental health--can be objectively, uncontroversially identified or "caught" at a point where there are *no observable symptoms* if only we use "screening" tests, and that it is very important to "catch" it in this way, because otherwise it will go on working undetected below the surface and doing incalculable harm before it is detected. Now, there are some things like this. Cancer, for example, is like cancer. But mental health just simply is not. It just is not a good analogy, and applying the cancer model to mental health is a disastrous idea. (By the way, I think we're also a little hyper about cancer screening and early treatment of cancer itself. I note here the controversy over whether early detection and treatment of prostate cancer actually lengthens people's lives, given its slow growth.)
HistoryWriter-
The things you list as "mental illness" are generally called "evil." Confusing the two is another barrier folks who are honestly just sick have to try to get over.
Given that there have been cannibalistic societies, and that torture, mutilation and murder are far from unusual in history, exactly what percentage of humanity is "sane"? Or sanity based off of your preferred standards of behavior? What evidence do you offer than Bundy and Dahmer could have been "caught" by mental health screenings in grade school? How much of the "go back in time and kill Hitler as a child" moral problem are you willing to just ignore on the assumption that this will not be abused?
There is no doubt when someone is deaf, or that immunization of easily spread diseases is broadly effective; "mental health" is a subjective diagnostic with broad chances to be misused.
Good points, Foxfier. Usually those that act out aggressively due to mental health problems (such as those with severe bipolar disorder) at some point recognize that their actions are socially unacceptable. Those that suffer from psychopathy (a kind of nebulous "mental health condition" that represents any behavior that society finds reprehensible) are purely narcissistic and see nothing wrong with their actions. While someone who is BP may state that they feel guilty about something they have done (hurt an animal, hit their sister, etc), a true "psychopath" will talk about what people have done *to them*, as their actions are always justified.
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Becky is correct: true psychopaths learn how to imitate normalcy. They don't really understand how people feel, but can put on an act.
HistoryWriter, you go straight to the extremes. The "average" psychopath is not Bundy or Dahmer, but perhaps your jerk of a boss who only cares about Number 1 -- which, irritating though it may be, isn't a crime. Many understand and are somewhat kept in check by the inconvenience of consequences, even if fear is foreign to them.
HistoryWriter:
For what it's worth, both Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were convicted of murder, the courts holding them responsible for their actions. Dahmer plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but was found guilty by a jury.
If I read your statement correctly that you support the "lobotomization" of children if they test positive for some kind of mental disorder, you have made perhaps the single most repulsive argument I've ever read on the Internet.
Foxfier and others have said what I was going to say. What Dahmer and Bundy did was EVIL. You know-EVIL. Remember that concept? Yes, it's coming back to you now. Well, that's what it was. Not mental illness. EVIL. What you're saying is profoundly prejudiced against handicapped people and a part of the social attitude that continues to oppress the handicapped and prevent the disability rights movement from achieving full social impact. Congratulations.
SparcVark: No, I don't favor lobotomizing children. I simply made a statement of fact, such as: "the world would be a better place if Hitler's mom had aborted him." Of course some folks might disagree.
As for Dahmer and Bundy being found guilty by a jury, you should be aware that insanity as a criminal defense is far different from insanity as a fact. Until the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981, the majority of states and the Federal courts used the American Law Institute (the “ALI”) Model Penal Code test for insanity as a defense, namely: "a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law." Because Hinckley mounted a successful insanity defense under that definition the Feds dropped it, as did a number of states; three or four even dropped the insanity defense altogether. Were Bundy and Dahmer insane? Well, if you consider their crimes – serial rape and murder, cannibalism, necrophilia – these are certainly not the actions of normal, sane people. However, they may be considered sane as a matter of law; but then we have all those messy definitions to cope with.
In criminal law there is a maxim “nullum crimen sine lege“, which is to say “there is no crime without a law to define it.” Now, if you accept the ALI criteria for the insanity defense under which Dahmer and Bundy were convicted and Hinckley acquitted, then you are also accepting the concept of criminality being what the law defines as such. OK so far? It follows, then, that you would be accepting the idea that murder is a crime defined by statute. From that, it follows that some forms of killing are not murder if specifically exempted by statute. OK so far? I think you can see the direction in which this is headed. The next time a pro-lifer says “abortion is murder” you can reply: “No, abortion is NOT murder because it’s not illegal.” If you don’t believe me ask Wesley. He’s an attorney.
Wesley: Is money really a consideration? Have you any idea how many tens of millions of dollars worth of damage Frank Terpil and his partner in crime, Ed Wilson (in jail for the rest of his life)were responsible for? Not to mention the millions that have been spent trying to track down Terpil and bring him to justice? We could have tested every kid in the US for a decade.
HistoryWriter-
Lovely digression into a hot-button issue. Except that most of us aren't saying "they're not insane, because they were found guilty." One person did, but most of us didn't.
You also don't answer the historical fact of societies did what those evil men did, and given that, are the actions alone enough to prove insanity.
Not to mention the millions that have been spent trying to track down Terpil and bring him to justice? We could have tested every kid in the US for a decade.
I really hope you were joking. If not, you really need to think of how very many people there are in the US.
In 2006, 4,265,996 (estimated) people were born.
Let's be highly conservative, and say that in a decade only 40 million children would be tested in your decade. (religious exemptions, lawsuits, strings pulled, etc)
That would mean that, at most, twenty-five dollars per child could be spent before you hit the billions mark.
this site pegs the lowest hourly rate for a clinical psychologist at over 25 dollars, for less than a year's experience.
So each child covered by that screening would have slightly less than an hour, in the course of their school career, being screened-- and it's supposed to pick anything up?
HW:
your non-sequitur about abortion aside, your argument was that Bundy and Dahmer were insane because they did awful things. I'm just saying that they didn't meet the legal definition of insanity, and you're providing no evidence that they meet any clinical definition, either. Most of us on this thread are suggesting that there is a difference between genuine clinical insanity and willfully performing evil actions.
More to the point of the post, your point is that some people do horrible things, therefore all children should receive a mandatory screening for mental illness - presumably with the kid being put on a watch list or incarcerated if they test positive. This would represent a massive, massive expansion of government power, and be ripe for abuse in more ways than I can count. I'm with Wesley in that this bill is needed, and that it's a very disturbing sign that the bill *is* needed to head off a Federal recommendation that this testing be made mandatory.
Paul is a libertarian, and I am not.Thats funny, he has been re-elected to Congress as a Republican since 1976.
Whatever labels work for you though...I guess supporting the Constitution and limited govt. or pro-life is no longer Republican values.
I still don't understand this argument. Because a person does something wrong, they have a mental health problem?
When my 6 year old lies to me, is that indicative of a mental health condition?
When someone rear ends another car and flees the scene, is that indicative?
Where do we begin to say the crime is indicative of a mental health problem?
Even Bundy and Dahmer had things they found reprehensible. They had lines they refused to cross (although they were much different from the rest of society's). The fact that their lines were drawn in a different spot does not mean they had a mental illness; it means they were criminals.
Well, there are different kinds of mental illness and insanity, all defined by the man-made definition, and I've seen evil and insanity coincide. I agree that there is a grave danger in testing everybody, and with Wesley's point about the left being about power, and that the focus on testing has cost the educational system dearly (because there are too many people who have studied "psychology" and therefore consider themselves to be, and are considered to be, educated, when they are not, and are not fit to have any effect on anyone else's life; in fact, the "field" draws loonies like flies) but I have to say that there are a whole bunch of people running around loose ruining others'lives who I sure as hell wish had been kept out of society altogether from day one. But then, I'm not Christian, or a fan of the human race, or a believer that everyone is as good as everyone else, or has as much potential, is capable of redemption, should be forgiven, etc. In any event, it seems to me that the law makes a lot more sense with respect to this stuff than the field of psychology/psychiatry does.
Becky: Surely you must see that there is a difference between junior's fibbing about taking an extra cookie, and Ted Bundy's deciding to murder three or four women in one day (three, I believe, was the actual body count in one of his more memorable rampages). Now if someone is going to deny that a person who does evil things --- and I mean REALLY evil things --- is likely to be playing with less than a full deck, there's little one can say to refute that. I daresay it goes hand in hand with belief in demonic possession, witchcraft, UFOs and miscellaneous things that go bump in the night. Like the "looks like, walks like, quacks like" duck, if someone tests like a psycho and behaves like a psycho, chances are very good he is one, and the fact that he understands exactly what he is doing when he commits an atrocity doesn't make him any less crazy. Frankly, if someone told me he didn't believe that Jeffrey Dahmer (who cannibalized his victims after torturing and murdering them) was a couple of enchiladas short of a blue plate special, I'd begin to wonder if that person had all HIS marbles.
An afterthought. Would anybody disagree with mandatory psychiatric testing without parental notification in cases in which a child clearly demonstrated the onset of serious psychological problems (such as in the case of Mr. Terpil, who liked to torture small animals when he was in fourth grade)? Is that unreasonable? Intrusive? Or should we wait until junior grows up and goes on to bigger, better things?
History Writer: A situation involving actual cause is different than blanket testing. Still, why wouldn't you notify parents? Of they refused consent, or even if they gave it, juvenile welfare laws might be invoked to require testing under due process of the juvenile courts. Rule of law: That's the way to go.
Wesley-Right. HW, if you're so in favor of the government raising children, why don't you move somewhere like Russia or Venezuala where the government already does such things? You'll fit right in.
Torturing small animals generally comes with a jail sentence-- check out the case in Washington where a man is facing a year and a half in jail for attacking a cat with a knife.
I think you've maybe been over-influenced by the fields of human behavior that try to rule out "evil" as a possibility.
While some insane people do horrible things-- I've lost a cousin with MD to suicide-- that doesn't mean that doing horrible things is proof of insanity.
Overall, everything I've seen points to people who are really mentally ill doing more harm to themselves than to other people.
Whatever happened to believing in evil?
I did something evil once - and it was a "minor" evil but it was evil and I acknowledge it now. When I was younger I poured boiling water on an ant hill. I wasn't doing it to get rid of the ants, or out of juvinal curiosity, or because I didn't know any better. I did it for the fun of it. It *was* fun when I did it.
It wasn't until much later on, when I saw the remains of the ant hill, that I felt any remorse. I did it because it was fun to kill the ants, and later on I realized that was a selfish attitude.
Most serial killers start off torturing and killing animals. The only difference between me and Ted Bundy was that afterward, in a moment of remorse, I empathized with the insects I killed, and try hard not to continue doing evil. Bundy claimed to have felt remorse, but never made up his mind to either stop himself before he killed or to make amends and give himself up after he killed. The thrill was too much for him to give it up.
Evil is a matter of decisions. Perfectly normal, mentally healthy people do evil. A good man can turn around and beat his wife if he feels pushed too far, and he'll be remorseful, apologizing, sending her flowers, anything to keep her from leaving. But the thrill of control gets too much for them, and the abuse continues either until the abused spouse leaves or one of them is dead.
One final note - The Green River Killer got away with murder for a very long time for three reasons. First, he was the only serial killer that I ever read of who would make himself stop killing for long stretches of time. Second, he could cover up his psychological defects and appear totally unassuming, so nobody pegged him on a psychological profile. Third, he could look at how he thought people were *supposed* to act and, using that pose, pass a lie detector test without any problem, because he was faking what he thought were appropriate emotions.
So, even if we had this psychological screening, it's not likely that it would be able to peg the really dangerous people out there. Dangerous people survive by learning how to seem harmless.
T.E.: That was a really good statement: Dangerous people DO survive by learning how to seem harmless.
I have to say, though, that although a State with such power is frightening, I'm on the same page with HistoryWriter on this one (even though I do believe in the reality of demonic possession, the efficacy of "witchcraft," spiritual energy making things go bump in the night, and the possibility of UFOs). All these things are a matter of definition. There's mental illness that's not "evil," and there's mental illness that inclines to evil acts. It's all how we choose to define it, and we have to remember that we are talking within the confines of manmade definition. If a person does bad stuff that harms others, it doesn't matter what we call them, they have to be stopped in order to protect others, and the sooner the better. By the time an adult is charged with a crime for injuring an animal, what else have they done, and is that the first time? They should get a pass on it before that because they are under age? Granted, many of those in the psychological professions are loony, and often destructive, themselves, but we don't have to call it "psychological" testing; it can be as simple as identifying "this is a bad one." Human exceptionalism itself includes the premise that humans are capable of evil and of choosing between good and evil. We don't want to say "this is a bad one" because the Christian, "nice" ethos which ties in with the "psychological" approach says that "then the kid will get low self-esteem." To hell with that; it's already a bad kid, and if it isn't stopped, well, HistoryWriter has given us a good example here of what happens down the line, from his own experience of having run into such specimen early on; he knows what he's talking about. Jeffrey Dahmer's victims and their families deserve consideration, as did the animals he tortured when he was a child, and so do a lot of other human and non-human animals.
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