Child Protective Services is destroying lives and families

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On Psychiatry and Child Protective Services in the United States:

Child Abuse is Child Protection is Mental Health Treatment is Drugging Children

Fred Baughman, Jr., MD
John Breeding, PhD
2003

The mission of the US Dept of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, has always been some notion of protecting our nation’s children from abuse and neglect. The federal state, as parens patriae, has gradually come to embrace, through evolution of our moral code and attendant law concerning the rights of children, its duty to assure these children’s rights. Each of these United States has an agency anointed to fulfill this mission, commonly known as Child Protective Services (CPS).

At one point during a meeting of “interested parties” to discuss a CPS reform bill this year in the Texas legislature, the CPS legal counsel clarified for someone who thought that it might help to have a police officer act in concert with a CPS worker in certain situations, “CPS IS THE LAW.” Child Protective Services acts with the authority of law. So just as with the importance of oversight and monitoring to ensure that needed police services do not go over that slippery slope into experiences of violation of civil liberties or police brutality, so is oversight and monitoring of Child Protective Services necessary.

Many think that state Child Protective Services have evolved into rogue agencies. This article will briefly mention the general practices of overzealous intervention, which have resulted in this charge being leveled at CPS. The main purpose of this essay, however, is to discuss a very specific concern. We believe that CPS agencies are doing consistent grievous harm to children and families, beyond the general dynamics of overzealous intervention. We believe that many thousands of families are being threatened, coerced and broken, not only for possible physical and sexual abuse, but for reasons having to do with the enforcement of the pseudo-scientific beliefs and attendant tragic and dangerous practices of our nation’s mental health system. The power of the state is enforcing the false beliefs and dictates of biological psychiatry, pressuring, coercing and breaking up the families of parents who reject the psychiatric diagnoses and psychotropic drugs for their children. Furthermore, the state, through CPS and foster care, is wreaking havoc on the children who it is supposed to be removing from harm’s way and making safe by systematically placing them on toxic, dangerous, addictive drugs. We will provide general background and specific examples to illustrate our assertion. First, however, a very brief history of Child Protective Services.

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