It's a common thought that what is new in the US will make it's way to Britain in a matter of years before the rest of the world gets "it." Technology such as the iPhone made it to the UK next in line after the US release of the product, and TV shows broadcast in the States don't take too long before they are shown here in the UK. The same with cinema releases, and to some degree social mores. Like the US, our liberal and former left-wing political community has taken a drastic turn to the Right in recent years, driven in the main by anti-Western dogma provoked by the 2003 Iraqi invasion. 

There are some things though that the US have adopted that we might want to debate before they reach our shores. One of the subjects in question is the mass automatic screening of teenagers for suicidal and/or violent tendencies and other mental health issues. The programme name is TeenScreen.

TeenScreen is perhaps an extension of the obsession US psychiatry has at present with medicating the young, even down to age 3. Drug companies have a greater influence in the US than they have in any country in the world, and it is perhaps good commercial sense to tap into the potential market that is the US population of teenagers.

 At present TeenScreen, a programme developed by Columbia University’s Child Psychiatry Research Department is limited in scope, though there is apparently a desire to extend its use to all US teenagers. With the US's obsession with firearms and a pronounced incidence of suicides amongst US 13 to 16-year-olds, there is certainly justification for a research programme into the mental health of US teeneagers. The question is, if such a programme extended it's "brief" to the wholesale medication of children deemed to be vulnerable to mental health issues, is that something we would like to see replicated in the UK, let alone the current screening programme in its current guise? The obvious concern is that such a thing can get out-of-hand rapidly, leading to the nightmare scenario of compulsory councelling and medication (as a requirement for the provision of education) all the way to forced sterilisation of young females deemed to be likely MSBP/FII mothers (an idea being repeatedly alluded-to amongst the US paediatrician community.) If such a scheme was to be promoted, what safeguards could be enabled to ensure it didn't get out-of-hand?

The link below is to a distinctly biased - anti TeenScreen site.

http://www.teenscreentruth.com/index.html

Wow for all those years that America and Britain fought the cold war against Russia's orwellian policies and socialist values and for the men and women who lost their lives fighting in the second world war to defeat the policies of the Nazi government to declare that we had won against these values just to have them creep into our society in other ways.

Constant interfernance by the state in our daily lives is bad enough and orwellian and stalanist to the etreme in these countries but forced steralisation against a mother who may or may not have an unproven illness even in the circles of the psychiatric genre as they fight over whether or not this 'illness' actually exists and as any scientist can tell you psychiatry is hardly an exact science and always open to personal opinion and dogma of the day, how would they compensate a woman thought to have MSBP if steralised and then found when the mood changed, as is usual in the psychiatric genre and it was decided this illness did not after all exist ?

Secondly to this, these children living in their dazed and confused state from an early age on Ritalin, are not better for these drugs, it's a childhood lost, the real tests of these stepford children will be when they try to come off these drugs when older to find that their lives spiral out of control and they are then the 'lost' part of society as they are 'mentally unwell'.

Let's face it, if we analyse everyone in society psychiatry will find 'something' wrong with each and everyone of us, to then label children in this way is not only inhumane but fundermentally wrong, if children were to be analysed then who next? For every job interview there would be a 'profiler' sitting opposite the candidate ( this already happens in some big companies, especially in the states) to marry would we need to be 'matched' and tested against possible divorce ( as with some computer dating programmes?) To be parents would we need a complete psychological breakdown of personality followed by a dna test to make sure no faulty genes get through?

Where does it end when we try to create the 'perfect' society, especially in teenagers, their hormones dictate their personality as much as the movie they watched the night before, except with the most extreme cases psychiatry is best left out of anything to do with child protection and policy making, how many cases such as the certain Doctor who was struck off last year will be making the headlines in the future?

Children need a lot of things in their lives, analysis isn't one of them.

This is an interesting issue - I blogged about it a while back. It seems there's a lot of opposition to it in the States and I would argue it risks putting children into a mental health ghetto before their brains have had a chance to develop

While I agree with the main arguments in this thread, except for the marrying of psychiatry to pop culture created pseudo-conditions, I think it is unfortunate at best and certainly can be construed as discriminatory to use phrases like "mental health ghetto". Those of us who are menatl health social workers battle daily to preserve the dignity of metal health service users and hope not to have to rehearse these amongst our colleagues. I am happy to have a discusion about the usefullness or otherwise of psychiatry and medical treatment but not if we are to have teh debate within these parameters.

I used the phrase because as I understand it many service users believe the mental health system is like a ghetto, principally because of the stigma they experience.I would be interested in what other people feel about the phrase though

 Ok - point taken

I don't think there's anything wrong with broaching the issue of emotional and mental wellbeing in schools. I think it's essential to get young people to think about their mental health along with their physical health.  This screening malarky seems to take it to another level though - if I was a US teenager being screened I think that I would be tempted to really ham it up and try to answer as worryingly as possible to have the teachers over - I wonder how often this happens?

Unfortunately I cannot find a link for the actual proposal,. As I understood it, this proposal was a further development of the Early Intervention Teams (which we have here) which target adults under 35 at their first presentation of psychosis. The aim is that intensive work at that time prevents/minimises long term dependency on Mental Health Services. I understood Teenscreen to be an even earlier indentifier of young people at risk of developing serious psychological and/or psychiatric problems, and provision of intervention at an earlier stage before the problems develop.

It should be remembered that this was a proposal to open a debate, there was no question of forcibly medicating anyone.

Perhaps, and of course I don't know this, Teenscreen site is reactionary and alarmist and not necessarily full of facts.