My Life as a Mom

Feel free to contact me: shirleykeeldar@poetic.com

With 6 happy kids, life can be really fun around here! This blog is dedicated to the joys and sometimes chaos of having a large family. Okay, so it's always chaos around here, but fortunately, it's almost always fun, too!

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

A frightening new trend in public schools is the TeenScreen program.

This is, believe it or not, a computer program - provided by a private company that makes oodles of money from it - that actually DIAGNOSES CHILDREN FOR MENTAL ILLNESS.

That's right. Psychiatrists aren't even pretending mental illness is a medical condition anymore, apparently. A computer can evaluate and diagnose your child, based on a simple questionnaire.

If you have kids in public school, you need to be aware that this program in some places operates with "passive consent" - meaning, they will send home a note, and if your child forgets to give it to you, your consent will be implied.

You MUST read up on this if you have school-aged children. One family is suing TeenScreen, after their perfectly normal daughter was told she was mentally ill. She had clicked "yes" on a couple of the questions, so after she took this little computer test she was taken into the hallway and told she was mentally ill.

Pretty crazy stuff.