Psychiatric Clinical Director Condemns The Dangers of Mental Health Screening

“Screening for mental illness serves no medical or societal purpose”

Prominent Psychiatrist and Psychiatric Clinical Director (Retired) Nathaniel S. Lehrman, M.D. minces no words when he makes the case in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons that “the involuntary government-sponsored mental health screening program represents psychiatric malpractice.”

Dr. Lehrman urges us to heed history with the warning “By allowing experts to define peaceful, law abiding citizens as ill and in need of treatment (which increasingly is becoming involuntary) the program comes to resemble the witch hunts of 16 -century Europe.”

I could not agree more with the Director’s closing recommendation “We need to start to undo psychiatry’s 50 years of overdependence on psychopharmacology, rather than expanding it through mental health screening.”

Advertisement