This page is devoted to quotes taken primarily from presentations, conventions, symposiums that have been given by Columbia University's TeenScreen representatives. It is up to the reader to decide if TeenScreen is really the benevolent program it claims or an organization that will funnel more and more children onto pharmaceutical drugs. Remember that these drugs (Prozac, Luvox, Xanax, Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Ritalin, etc.) are the same drugs behind the horrific headlines of school shootings, murder and suicide.

NOTE TO RESEARCHERS: Audio clips of selected quotes will be available soon on this page. Look for the blue play button.

Suicide more likely after a screening program
Jane Pearson, PhD, head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), in an article published on the NAMI website, has stated:

"For example, a prevention program designed for high-school aged youth found that participants were more likely to consider suicide a solution to a problem after the program than prior to the program."

Former TeenScreen director admits there is no suicide epidemic
Rob Caruano, former TeenScreen director stated to a reporter for the South Bend Tribune: "Teen suicides, while tragic, are so rare that (any) study would have to be impossibly huge to show a meaningful difference in mortality between screened and unscreened students. You'd have to be screening almost the whole country to reach statistical significance.'' Maybe this is why he is no longer a director of TeenScreen, since their main PR campaign is that there is an increasing "epidemic" of teen suicides. In fact, suicides in pre-24 year olds has been decreasing since 1996. Studies also indicate that a large number of teens who commit suicide are already in the care of psychiatrists and are on psychiatric drugs.
—South Bend Tribune, December 22, 2004

From a presentation by Leslie McGuire, given in Philadelphia in September 2002
Conference: Seventh National Conference on Advancing School Based Mental Health Programs
Presentation: "School Based Screening for Suicide and Mental Illness — TeenScreen"

Leslie McGuire admits that the TeenScreen program gives frequent erroneous indications (upwards of 84% according to TeenScreen founder, Dr. David Shaffer) that could incorrectly land kids in psychiatric hands and on psychiatric drugs: "...the TeenScreen does have a problem with false-positives..."

TeenScreen offers movie rental and fast food coupons (such as $5.00 Blockbuster and McDonalds coupons) as incentives for the kids to participate in the screening program. Some school programs use pizza parties as incentives, barring students from the parties unless they participate. McGuire says, "I think the larger incentive though is that they'd be able to miss maybe a days worth of class to be able to participate in the program, that works well too."

TeenScreen's intention is to get kids into psychiatric treatment, which means onto drugs: "...so our individual projects are designed to identify kids who are at risk of suicide and/or suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and then get them into treatment." This is an interesting statement, given that TeenScreen claims they have nothing to do with treatment. In reality, the standard psychiatric/drug treatment methods are what are intended.

McGuire: "With curriculum suicide awareness programs, these are programs that are designed to teach kids about the warning signs of suicide and also de-stigmatize suicide. So that hopefully kids will be more willing to get help for themselves or for their friends. And what we find when we evaluate these programs is that for the kids who are OK and aren’t experiencing mental illness, they think they’re interesting, they’re educational, they learn something. uhmm. For the kids though who are suicidal or have been suicidal in the past, they find these programs to actually be very disturbing, they don’t recommend that they be repeated again and when you talk to them they tell you that they sorta bring them, that these programs bring them back to a point of being pre-occupied with the idea of suicide again. So, certainly an unintended effect, but a scary and negative one. The other thing that these programs have been found not to do is increase the help seeking behavior. So, ya know, you’re not seeking help more often for yourself if you do become suicidal, or for a friend. The other troubling result that was found with these programs, uhmm, and these are really very prolific, these are, ya know, in many, many of our schools throughout the country, what we found was that when you ask kids before they participate in the program, if they think suicide is a reasonable response to a stressful situation, they say “no”. If after, you ask them the same question, after they’ve participated in the program, where the program has so de-stigmatized suicide, they actually say 'yes, it could be a reasonable response.' So again it’s sorta’ taking that taboo away."

Columbia did research on those other suicide programs that have been in place at schools, McGuire says: ".....when we brought our results back to our funders at NAMH and CDC they said well this is really no good, we can't say that all the methods that we're using out there don't work, we need to come up with something else. So they sorta charged us with that task and from there we created our TeenScreen program......."

"...how are we going to get every child in America screened and how can we help you to help us accomplish this?"

"We're working on a young child DISC currently, that will be able to be used with kids as young as I think either 3 or 5, but not yet, we're a few years away from that."

She also talks about there being "ways to up the amount" of consent forms that come back from the parents and she can talk about that later... She must have meant after the presentation as it never came up on the tape.
 

From a presentation by Laurie Flynn and Leslie McGuire, held on October 21, 2004
Conference: The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP)
Presentation: TeenScreen Symposium

Leslie McGuire:  "Most of the [TeenScreen] sites that we have across the country use Active Parental Consent meaning parents have to return a form saying 'Yes, you may screen my child' ahhh, and what we see from those sites is that about a little more then 1/2 the parents agree to have their children screened.  Of the 25% of our sites that use the waiver of consent, which means, uhmmm, y' know, we tell them, 'Unless we hear from you that we can't screen your child we assume we have your permission and we're gonna' screen them.' In those cases 84% of the parents opt-in or don't opt out really..." 

Laurie Flynn: "Now, here is something very important, in this day at this time, are we all familiar with the red states and the blue states? You need to know that the key to making stuff happen, ahh, in this day and age, is really what we might want to call, the green states. That is to say, the states where the key member, senator or member of the house, sits on a committee that appropriates money."

"And those states become very important targets, and those localities become very important localities, so we wanted to be visible in those kinds of places. So here you see that not only was Florida a good place for us, because of Governor Bush and our friend Jim McDonough in the Office of Drug Control, but because there was a couple of key members of Congress without whose support, health legislation does not pass and does not get funded."

"Similarly in New Mexico we had both opportunity, with the new Governor, we had opportunity with the new Secretary of Health, we had Senator Bingaman and Senator Dominici, different parties, both interested in stuff that benefits their voters in New Mexico, both interested in this program."

"And so, on and on you see, that each of the sites where we've tried to have multiple TeenScreen locations, tend to crosswalk with key members of Congress..."

"Pennsylvania has proven to be a particularly important site because of Senator Spectre, Arlen Spectre, who had a very close, ahh, primary, and we were all lighting candles and praying for him, mostly because he's Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and he was sold on this program and we really wanted to see him hang around long enough to sign a check for some of the growth of the program."

Flynn: "We were also able to promote this by placing some public service advertisements in major newspapers as well as newspapers that go to Capitol Hill..."

"One of the things that we did was to mail a copy of our report 'Catch Them Before They Fall' and we mailed a model resolution, ahh, to all the 50 states, we sent this as a very friendly, 'Here's some information you might like to use since you're on a health committee' — we mailed it only to people who were in key committees — 'you might like to have this resolution, to introduce the notion that every child should be screened for mental illness, at least once in their youth, in order to identify mental illness and prevent suicide.' So we offered them up some language and some tools, and a surprising number of folks, in fact, introduced it exactly the way we sent it and made some real strides with it."

From a presentation by Leslie McGuire and an Oregon TeenScreen Rep at the NAMI 2005 National Convention in Austin, TX
Conference: NAMI 2005 Annual Convention, June 18-21, 2005
Presentation: "The Columbia TeenScreen Program: A National Public Health Initiative to Help Identify At-Risk Youth"

Leslie McGuire, of Columbia University told listeners 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: "...and the participant assent rate, I think this is always really telling, is 98%, so 98% of kids who are given this opportunity say 'yes, I want to participate in this screening...' ." If this were true, why then would TeenScreen have to resort to using bribes such as pizza parties, fast food and movie rental video coupons?

A TeenScreen rep from Clackamas County, Oregon said: "...it's not the parents that we need to be going after, it's getting the enthusiasm of the kids who will go home and say 'mom and dad I wanna' do this'...'OK fine'... and they'll just sign off..." This shows TeenScreen's tactics to get the child excited to do the test and then getting the child to convince the parents. By getting the child's "buy-in", they manage to avoid having to explain to the parents what TeenScreen really is and what the consequences might be after the child is screened. In other words, they successfully avoid having to give the parents full informed consent.

NAMI TeenScreen Rep: "We're trying to look at how we could reach out to the community and offer that [TeenScreen] for families that are home-schooling."

Leslie McGuire: "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, you have to get them [the children] interested in it."

When asked about "incentives", McGuire replied: "Hollywood Video coupons, you get that regardless. Even if your form says no, you still get the incentive and reward."

TeenScreen talked about the importance of getting the child to that all important "first mental health appointment". No actual physical illnesses are checked for, only symptoms of behavior. McGuire says: "Sometimes though we have to call the insurance company for them and find out, ya' know, who can they go to, how do you get an appointment, sometimes you have to pick them up and bring them to the appointment. It's sorta' a continuum there, the goal is to get them to that first appointment." ... And TeenScreen says they offer no treatment recommendations! Heck, they'll even DRIVE you to that first appointment! What else would you call it if you have a child who's been asked a battery of potentially upsetting questions, has been labeled with a "mental disorder" based on nothing but symptoms to questions the child themselves have answered, has been assigned a certain "impairment score" and then referred only to a psychiatrist or "mental health" facility? What do you think the treatment will be? A recent study showed that 9 out of 10 children that have been referred to a psychiatrist end up on drugs. When TeenScreen says they do not recommend treatment it's like the gallows builder saying he didn't hang that man!

The NAMI TeenScreen Rep was explaining the difficulty of getting this into the schools and how they had to proceed covertly: "They started doing workshops and trying to help educate the school districts on TeenScreen so that the school - and they kinda' disguised it, in lots of different workshops to try to bring TeenScreen into the schools." Why the difficulty in promoting their program? If it is so obviously good for the children, why the need to resort to covert dissemination?

McGuire: "I've been talking a bit about this campaign of mis-information that's going on. And we do need your help, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pass around a blank notebook here. And if anyone in this room would be willing to be contacted if umm there if, if there was a sort of a uprising against screening in your community we have lots of people throughout the country who, y' know, there might already be screening going on in your community, we may ask you to write a letter to the editor in support of screening. We could possibly ask you to go to a school board meeting, umm something like that. Obviously this would be your choice, but, we are starting to create really a response network  and an e-mail list sorta' kinda thing, to keep people in the loop on this, ummm, so I'll pass it around and if you're interested please sign up."

The NAMI TeenScreen Rep from Clackamas County said: "...we're naturally running into problems, I mean we got some of the permission slips have been returned with these giant 'NO's' scribbled across them with a, with part of the website materials stapled to them."

When asked about getting the contact data for other sites that are screening, McGuire responded: "We generally don't divulge that information. Some sites want to share where they are and they want to connect people but generally we don't make that list public and that's so that they don't get swamped with lots of questions from people — you know — instead of coming to us where this is our job and we're paid to do that and it's also so they don't get targeted by some of these anti-screening groups."

For TeenScreen site locations, go to http://www.teenscreen-locations.com.

Researchers: Please stay tuned for more quotes as they become available—and for audio clips of these quotes when we have them digitized.