So I decided to check out the reports and articles. The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health delivered its report in July, 2003. You can find the report here: http://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov/reports/reports.htm
According to the summary, the objective was "to replace unnecessary institutional care with efficient, effective community services that people can count on." It recommends "fundamentally transforming how mental health care is delivered in America" so that "every American has easy and continuous access to the most current treatments and best support services." It strongly recommends that the services be "consumer and family centered", "not oriented to the requirements of bureaucracies." There is an emphasis on "getting mental health services" to Rural America, Racial and ethnic minority groups who may hesitate, and people whose primary language isn't English (immigrants).
Among the tools for this new program will be early mental health screening for all Americans, plus mental health screenings for the rest of us as well during physical exams. Also, the report says there will be a reliance on the "use of evidence-based, state-of-the-art medications and psychotherapies." (DRUGS - rrb) The report also recommends the use of electronic health records to "enable essential medical and mental health information to be shared across the public and private sectors." This sounds like a national database to me. (Of course, the reports says that privacy must be ensured. . .)
According to Jeanne Lenzer in the British Medical Journal (http://psychrights.org/articles/BMJBushtoScreenUSpop.pdf) from June 19, 2004, Bush has instructed "more than 25 federal agencies to develop an implementation plan" based on this report. Screening of school children can begin fairly soon - according to Keith Hoeller (http://psychrights.org/Issues/Screening/HoelleronScreening.htm), "Bush has placed into his `Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations Bill of 2005' (HR 5006) a proviso for the federal government to begin spending $20 million as an incentive for the states to screen all schoolchildren for `mental illnesses' and place them on `treatment.'"
So does this add up to eugenics? Maybe not yet - I didn't get a sense that the report's purpose was so. But there are a number of disturbing trends here that could go in that direction:
1. For an administration that preaches smaller government (and we all know now he doesn't mean it), why is there such a massive effort to create a national system on mental health? 2. Will the individual or parents have the option of withholding electronic records? Who is looking at these records once they go to the big government database? (Didn't the German's have an efficient national record system?) 3. Who exactly will screen our children for mental illness? Will they be under the same influences as those people who tried to put this language into an intermediate school in Texas: "Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use and suicide." http://americablog.blogspot.com/archives/2004_10_31_americablog_archive.html#109967328676555151
4. Is the emphasis on minorities and immigrants mean that they will be screened more often or more aggressively?
Again, Jeanne Lenzer clearly has one part of this equation: "Bush is the clear front runner when it comes to drug company contributions." Indeed, there is a pilot program in Texas, called TMAP, which has done well by these drug companies. So the drugs companies will make a killing. Then the question becomes, "shouldn't we be taking our kids OFF drugs, instead of putting them on drugs?"
But I am just as concerned about this kind of medical information getting into the hands of the cultural radicals.
Hopefully, a full-time journalist will pick up this story and get behind all of this. Does anyone have information on the Texas program?