This has been a grim week for anyone who cares about the precautionary principle guiding civilized medicine and the welfare of children.

If anything, the Obama administration seems to be pushing the radical pharmacological envelope even further than the Bush administration-- --at the very least, nothing has changed for the better in the government-assisted determined push to control / engineer America's children.

On Wednesday, an FDA advisory committee gave the FDA a green light to expand the marketing license of three toxic antipsychotic drugs--Seroquel, Geodon, and Zyprexa--for use in children.

Such approval gives manufacturers a shield from liability--for illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use.  And such approval ensures increased use of these drugs.  Manufacturers and mental health providers will profit while children's physical and mental health will be sacrificed. These drugs pose severely disabling, potentially lethal hazards--including diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease.

The body of evidence showing these drugs to be harmful is irrefutable: it is documented in FDA's postmarketing database, and in secret internal company documents uncovered during litigation. 

Did the FDA provide the advisory panel members with the evidence ? And if not, why not?

See, Evelyn Pringle's report, "FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers"

An article in TIME magazine gives credence to a not yet released report commissioned under the Bush Administration by a panel convened by the National Academies of Science.
 
The report, "Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People: Progress and Possibilities" (2009) re-iterates the earlier national mental health policy directive under President Bush:
The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (2002 )--which promoted universal mental screening and the expanded use of patented psychoactive drugs (those listed in industry-initiated, TMAP algorithm prescription guides).

See the NAS report brief to policymakers issued, March 2009:
 
The NAS report also recommends aggressive screening and pharmacologic intervention with toxic psychoactive drugs for children. The provocative, unsubstantiated premise is that mental illness can be detected through genetic screening--a la eugenics rationale--and that they can be prevented.

"Hundreds of studies that have appeared in just the past decade collectively suggest that the brain isn't so different from, say, the arm: it doesn't simply break on its own. In fact, many mental illnesses - even those like schizophrenia that have demonstrable genetic origins - can be stopped or at least contained before they start."

 "This isn't wishful thinking but hard science."

If the consequences of psychiatry's delusions weren't so serious, that statement is laughable. As every real medical scientist knows, psychiatry lacks even the rudimentary objective, scientifically verifiable tools of science, much less, "hard science."

The TIME reporter is impressed with NAS report weight in pagination: "a 500-page report, nearly two years in the making, on how to prevent mental, emotional and behavioral disorders."

"The [NAS] report concludes that pre-empting such disorders requires two kinds of interventions:
first, because genes play so important a role in mental illness, we need to ensure that close relatives (particularly children) of those with mental disorders have access to rigorous screening programs.
Second, we must offer treatment to people who have already shown symptoms of illness (say, a tendency to brood and see the world without optimism) but don't meet the diagnostic criteria for a full-scale mental illness (in this case, depression)....."

According to TIME, the authors of the NAS report recognize but rationalize the reality that mental screens will mislabel healthy individuals as mentally ill:
 
"Early-detection programs will identify as candidates for mental illness some people  who are merely persnickety or shy or eccentric."

Indeed, a responsible reason NOT to screen is the high false-positive rate of mental screens.  For example, the false-positive rate of TeenScreen, the mental health dragnet of school children, is as high as 84%.

TIME reports that that the invalid screening tools did not deter the NAS authors from recommending mental screening--even acknowledging that those mislabeled may be  prescribed toxic antidepressants and/ or antipsychotics:

"Some prevention programs even prescribe psychiatric medications, including antipsychotics and antidepressants, to people who aren't technically psychotic or depressed....But those who contributed to the National Academies report say preventing the suffering of people with mental illness is worth the risk of some false positives, partly because of the enormous cost of treating mental illness after it's struck."

The NAS report is available online in its unedited version--it has not yet been released.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12480

  Vera Hassner Sharav

Authors of the NAS Report:

COMMITTEE ON PREVENTION OF MENTAL DISORDERS AND SUBSTANCE  ABUSE AMONG CHILDREN, YOUTH AND FAMILIES: Research Advances and Promising Interventions

Kenneth E. Warner (Chair), School of Public Health, University of Michigan

Thomas Boat (Vice Chair), Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

William R. Beardslee, Department of Psychiatry, Children's Hospital Boston

Carl C. Bell, University of Illinois at Chicago, Community Mental Health Council

Anthony Biglan, Center on Early Adolescence, Oregon Research Institute

C. Hendricks Brown, College of Public Health, University of South Florida

E. Jane Costello, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center

Teresa D. Lafromboise, School of Education, Stanford University

Ricardo F. Munoz, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco

Peter J. Pecora, Casey Family Programs and School of Social Work, University of Washington

Bradley S. Peterson, Pediatric Neuropsychiatry, Columbia University

Linda A. Randolph, Developing Families Center, Washington, DC Irwin Sandler, Prevention Research Center, Arizona State University 
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