Simply put, TeenScreen considers that it and "mental health experts" know how to raise your children better than you do. TeenScreen's plan is to implement its screening program throughout the entire U.S. school system to detect problem behavior before it shows up. The unfortunate difficulty with the TeenScreen program is that students can be incorrectly diagnosed as having a "mental illness" when they don't have one 84% of the time — as admitted by TeenScreen's founder, Dr. David Shaffer. This is worse than flipping a coin. Once a student is labeled with one or more "disorders" he is referred to some type of mental health practitioner and in most cases will be given psychiatric drugs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax, Celexa, Ritalin, Luvox, Thorazine or several other antidepressants that the FDA KNOWS can cause suicidal thoughts—and repeated evidence has shown that violence, murder and suicide can often result. Psychiatrists state that mental illnesses are caused by a "chemical imbalance" in the brain. However, to date there are no blood tests, no chemical tests or any valid biological process that is used to determine what this supposed imbalance is—and no person who is currently taking psychiatric drugs has EVER been proven to have any type of imbalance. Yet this is the "reason" that is promoted, and this is the basis on which drugs are prescribed by psychiatrists and health practitioners around the world, to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars in profits for pharmaceutical companies.
		Antidepressant Induced Murder? Seventeen days after taking his first dose of Prozac, Kurt Danysh shot and killed his father, the one person he loved most in the world, by firing a shotgun blast into his head. The shooting was a complete shock and made no sense to anyone who knew Kurt and his father. Kurt had no history of violence prior to taking Prozac. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22.5 to 60 years in prison. Finally, in 2004, eight years after Kurt's conviction, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recognized that SSRI antidepressants, including Prozac, can cause suicidal and/or violent behavior particularly in adolescents and children, and in 2005 has required a "black box" warning on all antidepressants. Additionally, it has been discovered that Eli Lilly & Co. (manufacturer of Prozac) knew about and concealed information as far back as 1988 linking Prozac to violent behavior. More on Drugs & Violence »

TeenScreen Violates Federal Law by Using "Passive Consent" on Parental Consent Forms

TeenScreen doesn't want to reveal the methods they use to screen students
TeenScreen is being very tight-lipped on the screening materials and the questions they ask students. Why is this? This is actually against the law called the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.

The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment
Parents need to know this Federal law exists (commonly referred to as PPRA), that says you have a right to inspect those questions and materials before consenting to any screening of your child and that this screening requires written parental consent. Even so, in a TeenScreen newsletter (see page 3) they discuss making screening a matter of the schools curriculum as a method to bypass this law and use passive consent instead. This is a purposeful method of avoiding parental complaints against their children receiving highly controversial and potentially dangerous psychiatric testing and drugging.

Attempting to skate past the radar with "passive consent"
In some areas, TeenScreen currently uses what they call "passive consent" or “opt-out consent”, which requires no written parental approval to screen their child. Instead, a passive consent form is sent home to parents with the child and if they don't return it, signed by their parents, TeenScreen considers that the parents approve. But what if a parent never sees the form? What if the child never delivers it? Leslie McGuire, TeenScreen’s Co-Director, says: "Unless we hear from you that we can't screen your child we assume we have your permission and we're gonna' screen them." TeenScreen officials discovered that using (illegal) passive consent boosted the number of teens to be tested from 50% to over 95%.

Has your child received a mental health screening without your written permission? Please contact us with the details of what occurred.

The TeenScreen Procedure

Withholding report cards and using movie passes, food & videos to coax teens to participate
TeenScreen offers children “incentives” like free movie passes, food coupons, "I completed TeenScreen" stress balls, BlockBuster rental coupons and pizza parties, if they consent to the procedure or bring back the parental consent form. Some schools are withholding your child's report cards if the permission slips are not brought back to school.

One tactic TeenScreen officials use is to sell the child on the suicide survey first and after they have the child's agreement, they later contact parents. Leslie McGuire, co-director of TeenScreen, told listeners at the 2005 NAMI Convention held in Texas, that while only around 54% of parents would consent to a mental health screening for their child, when you asked the children themselves, nearly 98% of the children agreed with the idea of being screened. The key, therefore, was to sell it to the children and let them sell the parents. She said: "Getting the kids to buy in is such an essential thing because for the most part, you're distributing the consent forms to the kids to bring home to their parents and bring them back. So you have to get their buy in…."

TeenScreen's Parent Consent Form
Below are two links showing actual Parent Consent forms used by TeenScreen. One is an Active Consent Form where parents have to sign that it's OK to have their children screened. The second is the illegal Passive Consent Form, where if the form doesn't come back, TeenScreen considers the parents have approved the screening.

Click to view Active Consent Form
Click to view Passive Consent Form

Student Assent Form
The assent form is the “permission to screen” form that the child fills out before being screened. It’s important to note that on part of this form TeenScreen states: “d) I have been told that participation in this program is voluntary and that I am not required to do any of these things if I don’t want to. I may also refuse to answer any and all questions.”

Click here to view the Student Assent Form

Through inquiries to schools around the nation, it has been discovered that the computer test is set up so that you can not skip any questions, you must answer them all. If you refuse to answer or if you refuse to assent to the screening that the parent has said “yes” to, TeenScreen says that is an indication, in and of itself, of a positive screen and you are then carted off to the clinician immediately!

The Screening Questions
Before you see some of the questions that TeenScreen asks, think back to your childhood and remember...

1) Did you ever have a song stuck in your head and you just couldn't stop "singing" it? Did it ever last for days? Did you ever try to think of something else?

2) Was there ever a time you didn't feel like playing outside or couldn't find anything to do? ("Mom! I'm bored!, There's NOTHING to do!")

3) Were you ever nervous or anxious when you knew you had to give a presentation in front of the whole class?

4) Did you ever worry before taking a test and then during the test check and recheck your answers?

5) Did you ever want to sleep in until noon?

6) Did your parents ever get worried about you for any reason?


Now that you have that mindset, the questions you are about to read are taken from the screening questionnaire that the children take.

A full transcript of TeenScreen's Survey can be viewed here.

Now, as a child answering these questions do you think you might get the idea that your normal childhood behavior is "a significant problem" and that there is something wrong with you? I showed my daughter these questions without saying anything to her. Her response? “But doesn’t every kid feel that way sometimes?” I assured her it was quite normal. She responded, “But what about those kids that read that and now think there’s something wrong with them?” I had no answer for that. She did…..“I feel bad for them.”

Screening Information Form
Once a child has completed the above questionnaire and been determined to have a “positive screen”, this form is used to determine which "disease" the child can be labeled as having. Diagnosis variables are scored with points given for “impairment” and “symptom count” that indicates the number of diagnostic criteria a child meets for a given “disorder”.

• Labeling Checklist • Sample Summary Report with scoring

Arranging Treatment
From this point if your child has screened positive, TeenScreen is set up to "arrange treatment". It is important to note that TeenScreen claims throughout their literature that "The TeenScreen Program makes no treatment recommendations", yet "treatment" is the long term goal for TeenScreen according to their director, Laurie Flynn.

Here is an excerpt from TeenScreen’s procedures. You decide what their stance is on "treatment". From an article co-authored by Dr. David Shaffer, creator of the TeenScreen program, he explains what happens next:

“If the clinician feels that the student should receive treatment, he or she will introduce them to the case manager. The case manager should be a professional, e.g., a social worker or nurse practitioner, who has had experience in working with adolescents and their families. Their main role is to motivate the student and their parents to seek treatment and to connect the adolescent to a mental health service in their community. The case manager normally sets up an appointment at a local clinic and explains to the parent and youngster what is involved. They also remind the family about the appointment just before it is scheduled and check with them thereafter, to make sure appointments are kept.”

Calling insurance companies
TeenScreen has also stated, at one of their lectures, that this may also involve calling the family's insurance companies to get the information on where to go and what's covered—and sometimes that means to pick them up and drive the child to their first mental health appointment. TeenScreen seems to be in a huge rush to make sure these children get into psychiatric and pharmaceutical hands as soon as possible.

The only treatment is psychiatric treatment
One very important ommission is notable by its absence: TeenScreen’s materials neglect to mention anything about a child seeing a medical doctor to determine if the child has any actual physical disorders or if he or she is eating anything resembling a balanced diet. Both of these conditions have been demonstrated to be a major cause of teen problems. Yet they only make treatment arrangements with mental health service providers. Did you know that a lack of certain B vitamins and a diet high in refined sugar, white flour and highly processed foods can create actual symptoms of depression, lack of energy and listlessness? Yet TeenScreen and the psychiatric community pay little attention to nutrition, if any. Drugs are far more lucrative than seeing if the child is well nourished.

Interview with Psychologist John Breeding

In his 22-year career as a psychologist, Dr. John Breeding has witnessed a virtual explosion in the number of children said to be afflicted with supposed "learning disabilities" and "social phobias." He mentions a teen screen as one source of these bogus diagnoses and a lead-in to psychiatric drugging as shown in the interview excerpt below: 

Q: Have you helped any children get off these psychiatric drugs?

Dr. Breeding: “Yes, many. One dramatic story involves a young girl [Aliah Gleason] who was diagnosed as depressed, bipolar and suicidal by a teen screen program at her school. Children’s Protective Services [CPS] took her away from the home because her parents refused to medicate her. Over the course of nine months, CPS put her on 14 drugs. These parents were fighters, and they found support, and they stood up to the authorities, and brought their daughter home. I helped them prove that she is a normal, healthy, able child. We got her off 12 of the drugs, and then weaned her off the last two. She is now back in school and happily involved in classes and after-school activities again.”
Full interview »