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‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old

‘Parents must know they have the right to refuse these screenings’

By Jill Erzen | The Defender | August 27, 2025

Children as young as 6 months old should begin regular screenings for mental or developmental issues at every well-child visit, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a clinical report released Aug. 25.

Critics of the report fear the recommendations will lead to misdiagnosing and further overmedicating children.

“It is alarming that pressure is being put on pediatricians by the AAP to actively look for signs of depression in a 2-year-old,” Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT, told The Defender.

Pushing mental health screening for children leads to the expectation of psychiatric problems being woven into standards of care, said Robert Whitaker, author of “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.”

“And the screening instruments the pediatricians will employ will have been constructed to identify a certain percentage of children as being in need of treatment,” he said.

The AAP report, published online in the journal Pediatrics, recommends that mental health screening begin at 6 months old and continue as part of well-child visits at ages 1, 2 and 3. After age 3, screening would continue annually.

The report said as many as 1 in 5 children in the U.S., including kids as young as 2, have mental or behavioral issues such as depression, anxiety, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or suicidal thoughts.

However, studies show mental health issues are commonly misdiagnosed. Depression has been falsely diagnosed 66% of the time, and generalized anxiety disorder has been incorrectly assessed 71% of the time.

“Parents should be more than just skeptical,” said Whitaker. “They should be alarmed by this push for ‘early detection.’ Screening of children, starting when they are very young, will of course lead a significant percentage to be diagnosed with one disorder or another.”

That diagnosis then “serves to pathologize the child, and that diagnosis may stick to the child for years, possibly through childhood and into adulthood,” he said. And a diagnosis “often will lead to a prescription for a psychiatric drug, and the scientific evidence on this is quite clear: over the long term, this will harm the child.”

Whitaker added:

“Or to put it another way, while screening and early detection is presented to the public as an effort to help the child, in reality it serves as an assault on the child’s right to be — to grow up without being tagged as ‘abnormal’ and forced to take a drug that will change the child’s capacity to experience the world.”

Screening toddlers for psychiatric disorders is ‘medically reckless’

The AAP claims rates of mental, emotional and behavioral problems in the U.S. are rising, and early detection will lead to intervention.

However, an August 2022 study in Preventive Medicine concluded that screening adolescents for depression does not reduce their treatment for suicidal behaviors.

A 2017 review found no evidence that screening children improves mental health outcomes, but instead raises the risk of potential harm and wasted resources.

“Screening babies, toddlers and schoolchildren for psychiatric disorders is medically reckless,” said Jan Eastgate, president of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International, a mental health industry watchdog.

She added:

“The questionnaires are based on a subjective and unscientific diagnostic system that pathologizes normal childhood behavior. Instead of helping families, they funnel children into a pipeline of psychiatric drugging — substances that can be addictive, damage the heart, and even drive them to suicide.”

The AAP, which represents 67,000 pediatricians in the U.S., stated that pediatricians are best equipped to work with families to identify issues early and provide children with the necessary help.

The AAP is also a lobbying organization. It spent between $748,000 and $1.18 million annually over the previous six years to advocate for its members, according to Open Secrets.

Some of the AAP’s biggest financial contributions come from major pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, GSK, Merck, Moderna and Pfizer.

In January 2024, an AAP study published in Pediatrics found that more children were being subjected to restraint drugs — antipsychotics used to sedate — because more children were being admitted to mental health facilities.

During the 2016-2021 study period, the analysis found a 141% increase in the use of restraint drugs overall, and longer inpatient stays. Pharmacological restraints tend to be used with greater frequency on autistic children, low-income children and children of color.

According to the mail-order pharmacy Express Scripts, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers increased 38% from 2015-2019.

The AAP has been diagnosing and medicating children for decades, and the data show it doesn’t benefit children, Whitaker said.

He added:

“Early detection will just amplify the harm that is already being done to so many children by diagnosis plus drug treatment.

“What we should be doing if so many of our children are struggling, starting at an early age, is fixing the environment for raising children in our country. The children’s struggles don’t tell of a problem within the child, but within our society, and diagnosing the child just puts the blame inside the child.

“This promotion of early detection. … It’s an assault on our children.”

‘Alarming list of serious side effects’

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a first-line medication for children diagnosed with moderate to severe depression and anxiety. However, these medications carry a black box warning for a potential, though low, increased risk of suicidal thoughts, according to the AAP’s webpage, Antidepressants: Pediatric Mental Health Minute Series.

“SSRIs have an alarming list of serious side effects, the most egregious of which might be serotonin syndrome, which can cause death,” Seneff said. SSRIs raise levels of serotonin — a hormone and neurotransmitter that regulates mood.

While common side effects of SSRIs include diarrhea, headache, sleepiness and weight gain, the medications are also associated with serious adverse events, including heart rhythm changes, bleeding and thoughts of suicide or self-harm.

The risks of prescribing antidepressants are greater in children than in adults, Seneff said:

“A child’s developing brain will respond to these drugs in unpredictable ways. Early exposure to SSRIs could lead to permanent but currently unknown disruptions in brain development. We should rather be devoting our efforts to figuring out why so many kids are so emotionally disturbed today.”

Studies show benefits don’t outweigh risks

A 2025 study examined the link between antidepressant medications and fatal heart events. Researchers reviewed the death records of every adult ages 18-90 living in Denmark in 2010. In all age groups, the longer people used antidepressants, the more likely they were to die from sudden cardiac death.

In June 2022, the International Journal of Risk Safety Medicine published a study raising concerns about the first U.S.-approved SSRI antidepressant, fluoxetine. The authors reviewed several core studies used as the basis for the drug’s approval, and found that “the two pivotal trials showed that fluoxetine is unsafe and ineffective.”

Fluoxetine is the only SSRI antidepressant approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating major depression in patients as young as 8 years old. Yet, the FDA warns that children treated with antidepressants should be closely observed for agitation, irritability, suicidality and unusual changes in behavior.

The benefits of SSRIs have not been shown to outweigh the risks.

In 2022, FDA researchers published an extensive review of antidepressant studies in the BMJ. In total, the data from 1979-2016 covered 73,388 patients with diagnosed depression.

The analysis found that antidepressants outperformed placebo in just 15% of patients, and the benefit was almost entirely limited to people with the most severe forms of depression. For everyone else, the improvement was likely due to belief and expectation, not the drug itself.

The AAP recommendation for mental health screening was announced just weeks after Illinois became the first state to mandate mental health screenings for students in grades 3-12.

The Illinois law, set to take effect in the 2027-2028 school year, requires schools to conduct self-screenings annually using either digital or paper forms.

CCHR International said such subjective screening has shown an 84% “false positive” rate that could lead to teens being prescribed antidepressants, which in turn have been linked to an increase in suicide and/or acts of violence.

The source of such screening questionnaires can also be suspect, according to CCHR International.

The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) was first developed in 2001 and administered as a universal intervention in high schools to identify and treat depression, according to CCHR International. It was developed through a grant from Pfizer, the manufacturer of the antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline).

In 2010, the company made both its PHQ-9 and General Anxiety Disorder questionnaire available to primary care doctors “without copyright restriction and at no charge.” Prescriptions of sertraline jumped 33%, from almost 29 million prescriptions in 2004 to over 38 million in 2020.

“Parents must know they have the right to refuse these screenings,” Eastgate said. She added:

“Signing an ‘Opt-Out’ form is essential to protect their child from being falsely labeled with a mental disorder and drugged. Informed consent belongs to parents — not to a psychiatric screening checklist that has no scientific foundation and is often developed by pharmaceutical interests.”

Related articles in The Defender

• Big Money for Pharma, Big Risk for Kids: When Doctors Prescribe Antipsychotics and SSRIs for Children With Autism
• Antidepressants Linked to Higher Risk of Sudden Cardiac Death in Young Adults
• Nearly 100 Children a Day Go to ER for Drug-Related Reactions, Australian Report Finds

August 30, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science | AAP, United States