TeenScreen is a very controversial, unworkable and unscientific suicide screening program developed by a psychiatrist named David Shaffer. It is obvious that psychiatric drug manufacturers are very interested in this program because it will funnel more customers to them - our children. Shaffer himself admits that TeenScreen identifies "a whole bunch of kids who arent really suicidal, so you get a lot of false-positives." which means that a whole bunch of kids with nothing at all wrong with them, will be interrogated by mental health clinicians to find out what's "wrong". TeenScreen's goal is to screen every child in the United States before they graduate from high school, which the pharmaceutical companies love, because that would mean thousands and thousands of more kids on psychiatric drugs (the ones with the FDA Black Box warnings) and labelled for life with a "mental illness."

TeenScreen is very secretive about their locations. Where the public has become aware of TeenScreen, there have been protests, tough questions that TeenScreen does not want to answer and a federal lawsuit.

Don't let your children be swept up into this unproven and unworkable "suicide screening" net
This web site is a warning for parents to be on the lookout for TeenScreen programs in your local schools. Call your child's school and find out if they are using TeenScreen.

According to TeenScreen's director, Leslie McGuire, TeenScreen is fearful there will be an uprising against mental health screening (quite correctly), therefore TeenScreen refuses to divulge their locations. By clicking the following link you can hear an audio file of Ms. McGuire talking about her problem:

McGuire Reveals TeenScreen's Fear

"We generally don't divulge that information. Some sites want to share where they are and they want to connect people but generally we don't make that list public and that's so that they don't get swamped with lots of questions from people — you know — instead of coming to us where this is our job and we're paid to do that and it's also so they don't get targeted by some of these anti-screening groups."

Contacting TeenScreen
If you write to TeenScreen to ask where their programs are you will receive a standard e-mail message as follows:
"We get a lot of requests from people who are interested in locating and speaking directly with local TeenScreen sites and this can become a burden on them. We are not authorized to give out our sites contact information unless we have requested their permission to do so."
If you don't believe this you can call TeenScreen directly here: 866-833-6727 or you can e-mail them here: teenscreen@childpsych.columbia.edu