Under 5 Years Old Mental Health Screening
Children Under 5 Years Old from Being Screened for “Mental Illness” & Put at Risk of Being Drugged
Australia already has 125,328 children aged 0-11 years old on a potentially dangerous psychiatric drug, 2,546 of those aged 0-4 years old. This is despite the Australian Government having issued over 80 psychiatric drug warnings to warn of the risk of agitation, aggression, increased blood pressure, hallucinations, heart problems and possible death.
Doesn’t Australia already have too many toddlers on drugs that could cause damaging effects to their developing brains and ruin their futures?
Now there are alarming psychiatric recommendations to screen our 1.8 million children under 5 years of age for “mental illness” and “emerging mental illness.”
The recommendations may seem harmless, because of course we all want our children to be healthy, but there are hidden risks. Amongst “wellness” questions, are those relating to “emotional and social well-being”—another name for or a forerunner to labelling a child mentally ill. The source of these recommendations is clear that psychiatric drugs are a “treatment” option.
- Psychiatry has already tried to screen all Australian 3 year olds between 2012 and 2015 with the expansion of a physical check done by GPs to include mental health screening. It was trialled and scrapped in 2015 after enormous criticism from professionals and the public.
- When New Zealand introduced mental health screening for 4 and 5 year olds, within 4 years prescriptions of antidepressants to 0-4 year olds increased by 140%.
The number of toddlers already prescribed potentially dangerous psychiatric drugs is set to greatly increase if these recommendations are implemented.
Here are some facts you need to know about why these recommendation cannot proceed:
- While medical disease can be screened for and verified, there are no valid tests to confirm any psychiatric diagnosis.
- The screening questions used to “diagnose” are so subjective that any child could be at risk of being labelled mentally ill and potentially recommended for a prescription of psychiatric drugs.
- Symptoms for so called psychiatric disorders for 0 to 5 year olds include: difficulty sleeping, tantrums, talking too much, hyperactivity and “loses track of things used regularly (eg., losing track of a favourite stuffed animal)”.
$0.5 million has been given to the National Mental Health Commission to develop national guidelines for this mental health screening of under 5 year olds.
It is proposed that maternal and child nurses in community health services expand the current physical checks being done to include behavioural screening. Identified children may be referred for further assessment and possible diagnosis based on questions on a subjective checklist and could lead to a psychiatric drug being recommended.
TAKE URGENT ACTION
Help stop the funding and implementation of this mental health screening in your state or territory by contacting your Government Ministers.
