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We're all crazy now

It's been a while since I've seen anything about the Bush administration's drive to screen the masses for mental illness, so I was glad to come across this British Medical Journal article:

The parents of an Indiana teenager have filed a suit in a federal court in the state's Northern District, charging that school officials violated their privacy rights and parental rights by subjecting their daughter to a mental health screening examination without their permission. [...]

The complaint, filed on 19 September, charges that in December 2004 Chelsea Rhoades, then a 15 year old student at Penn High School, Mishawaka, was told she had obsessive compulsive disorder and social anxiety disorder after she took the TeenScreen examination. Chelsea has spoken out against the screening and, with her parents, alleges in the complaint that "a majority" of the students "subjected to TeenScreen" with her were also told they had "some mental or psychological disorder."  [...]

Columbia University's TeenScreen, which urges "universal" voluntary screening for all teenagers, has come under fire for offering free cinema passes and other inducements to teenagers in the hope of encouraging them to return parental consent forms. The programme has also been criticised by the Rutherford Institute, a non-profit civil liberties organisation, for using "passive consent," in which only parents who do not want to have their children screened have to sign a form and send it in to the school. If the school does not receive a form, it is assumed that the parents do not object.

I've already stated my concerns about coercive mental health screening, which the uninitiated can find here and here.

(Via American Iatrogenic Asso.)