Youth oppression: From juvenile detention to psychiatric
medication
By Stephanie Nichols
A survey done by the House Committee on
Government Reform of juvenile detention centers across the
country found that at least 15,000 children with psychiatric
problems and mental disabilities were incarcerated last year
because mental health services were unavailable to them.
This shows that the government chooses to pump more money
into juvenile detention centers than into treatment services
for youth with mental disabilities. Nor is any care given to
seeking out the source of their problems. Instead, all the
blame is put on the victim, the youth. Children as young as
seven are being incarcerated. And according to the July 9 New
York Times, "Seventy-one centers in 33 states said they were
holding mentally ill youngsters with no charges."
Not only are youth in this country being incarcerated for
having mental disabilities, many of them are being put on
expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit which
also can have potentially deadly side effects.
The Bush administration plans to unveil a new policy in July
as a part of the New Freedom Initiative plan, based on
recommendations issued by the New Freedom Commission. The
commission states, "Each year, young children are expelled from
preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive
behaviors and emotional disorders." According to the
commission, schools are in a "key position" to screen their
students, as well as any adults who work with them.
The plan is using the Texas Medication Algorithm Project as
a model for treatment. When Allen Jones, an investigator at the
Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, revealed that the
pharmaceutical company Janssen had bribed key state officials
who held influence over the medication plan in his state, he
was removed from his job.
The Texas Medication Algorithm Pro ject, which started in
1995, promotes the use of newer, more expensive drugs for the
treatment of patients and helped make drug companies billions
of dollars. And some of the billions of dollars they make go
straight into the presidential campaigns of both George W. Bush
and John Kerry.
Instead of nurturing children and providing services where
youth can grow and develop, the capitalist government, which
needs oppression to survive, uses the youth to generate profits
by keeping them either locked up or drugged up.
By putting money into creating better schools and paying
teachers better wages so they could offer individualized
attention and smaller classes, and providing free health care
to all, or by providing working parents with better wages and
fewer working hours so that they could focus on their
children's needs, the rich class which owns the corporations
that run this government could not squeeze as much profit from
the working class and oppressed, and the government could not
exert as much control.
Reprinted from the July 22, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
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