Experts Urge Caution as AAP Calls for Mental Health Screenings for Newborns to 21-Year-Olds
From Youngsters’s Well being Protection: “The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) this month added suggestions for preventive pediatric healthcare to its 2022 Periodicity Schedule, often known as Bright Futures — together with the advice to ‘screen for despair and suicide threat’ yearly in kids beginning at delivery and as much as 21 years.
With specialists warning of a mental health crisis amongst kids and adolescents, the AAP’s advice, no less than on the floor, could seem sound and affordable.
However despair screening could be harmful, some specialists say.
Dr. Allen Frances, professor and chairman emeritus of the Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke College College of Drugs, in 2016 told The Wall Street Journal that despair screening dangers medicalization of the ‘regular’ and that ‘teenagers could also be haunted for all times by carelessly utilized labels.’
Dr. Edmund Levin, who makes a speciality of adolescent psychiatry, wrote in Adolescent Psychiatry, ‘Over-diagnosis must be thought-about as a contributor to the pattern of accelerating percentages of youth being identified and medicated for a wide range of psychological well being situations, together with despair.’
. . . may the AAP’s new advice end in many extra kids being prescribed profitable and harmful psychiatric medication — a few of which may trigger suicide, particularly in kids, in accordance with their very own labels?
The AAP describes itself as ‘a corporation of 67,000 major care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists devoted to the well being, security and well-being of infants, kids, adolescents and younger adults.’
But a fast take a look at its top donors reveals corporations whose merchandise could typically battle with the ‘well being, security and well-being of infants, kids, adolescents and younger adults.’
These embrace Ronald McDonald Home Charities, the biotech big Sanofi Genzyme, child powder maker Johnson & Johnson (among the many AAP’s “prime 10 donors”) and the drugmakers Abbott, Merck and Novavax.
The AAP is hardly the one well-respected medical affiliation to play either side of the road — taking drugmaker money whereas giving ‘trusted’ medical recommendation.
Neither is it the one affiliation to ascertain detailed suggestions and screenings for sufferers — screenings that always immediately enrich drugmakers.”
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