TMAP, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, was initiated by Johnson & Johnson, together with other pharmaceutical producers, as a way to assure prescription of certain psychiatric medicines through State medical programs. The program, which was exposed by Allen Jones, an investigator turned whistleblower, is complemented by TeenScreen, a psychiatric screening program to be run in schools all over the US. The plan was to test kids by simple questionnaire and then prescribe them psychiatric drugs in accordance with TMAP, and it is being put into effect right now.

Allen Jones had filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson in 2004, but the case was sealed from public view until recently, when Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott joined the case.

A message from TeenScreenTruth calls on parents across the US to act to bring the fraudulent medication program and its sister, the screening scheme, to the attention of school boards, politicians and the media:

TeenScreen's Evil Sister - TMAP, Texas Medication Algorithm (guidelines) Project is a dastardly plan concocted by drug companies to influence government officials to push the newest most expensive antipsychotic drugs. The below story is the first of surely many more to come. Both TMAP and TeenScreen were "recommended" by the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

Both are going to go down with a thud but your help is needed. To augment the national controversy, pick a school in your neck of the woods www.teenscreen-locations.com/index.htm and raise the dickens with school board members, legislators, newspapers, radio and your local TV news. Any talk radio show, for example, would be interested in what you have to say about the national controversy of TeenScreen asking kids as young as 9 years old questions about suicide and then referring them to "treatment" (drugs).

Meanwhile, the lawsuit filed by whistleblower Allen Jones looks set to bring some additional motion to the scene. With Medicaid all but bankrupt ... paying for expensive and often unnecessary medications, there might be a synergy of interests to recover some of the lost money for the State and save the children's sanity at the same time.

Here is 'the below story', an article about the lawsuit in the Austin American Statesman:

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Austin American Statesman

State's mental facilities duped into using drug, Abbott alleges

Lawsuit claims state official pushed drug, was rewarded with money.

By Jason Embry, W. Gardner Selby
December 16, 2006

A major corporation and several subsidiaries misrepresented the safety and effectiveness of an anti-psychotic drug and unduly influenced at least one state official to make it a standard treatment in public mental health programs, according to a lawsuit the state has joined.

Attorney General Greg Abbott joined a lawsuit filed in Travis County district court by Allen Jones, a former investigator for the state of Pennsylvania, against Johnson & Johnson Inc. and five related companies. Jones says in the lawsuit that he learned of payments to at least one Texas mental health official in interviews he conducted as an investigator. No official is named in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which came to light Friday, seeks to recover for the state untallied alleged overcharges to the state's Medicaid program, which pays for health care for low-income people.

Jones' lawsuit alleges that the companies launched a drug named Risperdal in 1994 to treat schizophrenia. About the same time, the state was developing a protocol, or treatment guidelines, for which drugs should be used in public mental health programs. The defendants "provided substantial financial contributions to and improperly influenced the development" of the protocols, the lawsuit said, and Risperdal took precedence in the protocols over cheaper, equally effective medicines.

The drug later received recommendations as the medicine of choice in the state's mental health protocol for treating children and adolescents, even though it lacked a Food and Drug Administration indication for those age groups, the lawsuit says. It says side effects and health risks include increased chance of stroke, renal failure and hyperglycemia.

The companies pushed Risperdal in other states through paid consultants on expert panels, peer-to-peer marketing strategies and "administrative decisions made by a select few public officials," the lawsuit says. The companies sent an unnamed Texas official around the country as a spokesman for the drug, and they hired third-party contractors to conceal their control and funding of medical education programs, speakers' bureaus and clinical research that promoted the benefits and safety of Risperdal, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says at least 17 states, including Texas, have implemented the protocol or are doing so.

"We allege it's a scheme whereby they passed off as medical science phony representations and misleading facts about the efficacy and appropriateness of these drugs," said Thomas Melsheimer, a lawyer for Jones.

Abbott's office declined to comment on the lawsuit, as did spokesmen for Johnson & Johnson and the state's Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees the Medicaid program. A commission spokesman did say Texas paid 308,000 claims totaling $73.5 million for Risperdal in 2005.

Melsheimer described Jones as a "classic whistle-blower" who filed the lawsuit in 2004 on behalf of Texas to recover the companies' overcharges. Because of his whistle-blower status, the lawsuit was sealed from public view until Abbott joined it.