Government to screen schoolchildren for mental illness?

President Bush plans to unveil next month a sweeping mental health initiative that recommends screening for every citizen and promotes the use of expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs favored by supporters of the administration.

The New Freedom Initiative, according to a progress report, seeks to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," the British Medical Journal reported.

Here we have the rare opportunity to blast this idiotic proposal using references to two different dystopias: Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.

Let's start with Orwell. The title of the program, New Freedom Initiative, is doublespeak at its best. One of Orwell's premises was that the language affected how people think; if you make a statement impossible to express in words, most people will be unable to think it. Words act as a kind of mental shorthand, allowing a complicated concept to be referenced by a much simpler name. They are the foundation of persistant and communicable rational thought. Without the words to express a concept, it is much harder to think it -- and it cannot be expressed to anyone else, remaining locked into the mind of each person who invents it.

The basic idea of political correctness is the idea that names have power. The Geek with a .45 called it Magical Thinking when he applied it to a school's dress code. Although modern society is not generally disposed to believe in any form of magic, language and symbology do have a certain influence over human behavior. And this is exactly what the Bush administration is seeking to exploit with this program.

They call it the New Freedom Initiative. They are associating the program with the word "freedom", when in fact there is little freedom involved, and the whole concept behind the program is reducing freedom. But, simply by naming it, they attempt to associate the program with freedom -- in most minds, a positive association. How can anyone oppose freedom?

Here are some of the wonderful new "freedoms" recommended as part of this program:

1. Comprehensive psychological examinations for all citizens, including children
2. Treatment of everyone, including children, found to have "mental disorders"
3. Drugging as a treatment

Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General says in his whistleblower report the "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that developed the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."

Just to remind you, they are talking about doing this to your kids at school. I doubt they plan to ask the parents, since the whole idea is to get the government to pay for it. The social forces behind drugs in school are already well advanced -- just ask the parents who have been jailed for refusing to give their children behavior-modifying drugs.

And that leads us right into Huxley's Brave New World, where everyone is drugged all the time. What are the results of a society on drugs? When everything you do feels good, it doesn't matter what you do. Murder? Rape? General laziness? They all feel the same; the drug overrides everything else.

It's one thing to choose that existance, when you can be held responsible for your choices and their consequences. Most of the time, you're only hurting yourself. But who can be held responsible when the government is drugging you at the behest of drug manufacturers who have discovered that they can pay the government to buy their product with your money.