I posted this in August of 2005, and the new information that follows my original post tends to suggest it was prescient in the extreme:
"TeenScreen is planting the seed of mental illness in the minds of children. School kids are being conned into taking a survey full of loaded questions and the results are being used to convince parents their children are mentally ill and need dangerous brain-damaging drugs.
All children at times feel depressed or different from others, or not smart enough, or not good-looking enough. This is normal adolescent thinking. The TeenScreen survey asks whether the child has ever felt this way and phrases questions to solicit one answer, yes. It takes advantage of impressionable kids when it raises questions about normal feelings."
Now (June 2006) comes a report from the National Institute of Health showing that the rate of prescribing off label drugs for psychiatric use in young people has increased exponentially in recent years, and that 77% of those prescribed the drugs have not been diagnosed with any mental disturbance whatsoever... additionally, the drugs have neither been approved for this use, nor tested for pediatric use.
