Mental

Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation on Bush’s Brave New World:

President Bush’s little-publicized New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has proposed comprehensive mental-illness screening for all Americans. If this proposal is carried out, which is Bush’s intention, no adult or child will be safe from intrusive probing by “experts,” backed by drug companies, who believe that mental illness is woefully underdiagnosed and therefore that many millions of people ought to be taking powerful and expensive psychiatric drugs. Schools and doctors’ offices will become quasi-psychiatric monitoring stations.

And this is the smaller, less intrusive government that conservatives are always promising us? Liars.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas tried to forbid the federal government from funding mental-health screening, but the House turned down his amendment to the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services. Paul, a physician, said the program was a usurpation of parental rights, pointing out that parents can already be charged with child abuse for refusing to give their children Ritalin for alleged attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He said, “Psychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children’s typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs.”

Again, with the “smaller, less intrusive government that conservatives are always promising us” stuff. It seems that Ron Paul is the only Republican honestly trying to give it to us.

Alina Stefanescu has her say on this bad idea here.