Dr. Dorothy Davies Johnson of Tucson is a board-certified developmental-behavioral pediatrician with ROADS Publishing & Consulting Inc.

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Opinion by Dr. Dorothy Davies Johnson

The Star reported Jan. 7 on a bill sponsored by Sen. Karen Johnson, R-Mesa, to "require state health officials to report annually on the amount of psychotropic drugs to treat kids in publicly funded health programs." This is one in a series of bills introduced by this legislator and several of her colleagues consistent with the Church of Scientology's core tenet that mental illness is a fabrication fostered by the profession of psychiatry and that medications for treating presumed mental illness are bad.

This bill threatens to impose a cult belief on the most vulnerable and needy — children in foster care — with its poorly veiled intent to decrease access to appropriate psychotropic medication for those children.

According to a May 2006 article by Amanda Crawford in the Arizona Republic, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, was a science fiction writer who believed mental-health issues should only be addressed within a "religious" setting — specifically, extremely expensive "auditing" counseling sessions within their church.

The Church of Scientology has no connection with science or any mainstream religion.

Contrary to Scientology doctrine, mental illness is real, debilitating and often treatable with a combination of specific medication and therapeutic interventions that have been scientifically scrutinized. Mental-health problems such as depression, attention deficit- hyperactivity disorder, panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder involve some imbalance of chemicals that convey or modulate messages in the brain.

As medication treats chemical imbalance in diabetes or hypothyroidism, so medication can treat chemical imbalances within the brain.

Early intervention combining psychotropic medication and other therapies can lead to enormous improvement in a child's immediate quality of life and long-term developmental well being. In this, the 21st century, medications for mental illnesses (psychotropic medications) are well understood and refined. All medications for ADHD and many antidepressants have been tested in recent years for safety and efficacy in children.

The science of mental health has come a very long way since 1950 when L. Ron Hubbard published "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health." Today's tragedy is that access to mental-health services is too limited due to the shortage of trained child and adolescent psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals, and the lack of funding parity between mental and medical health care.

Efforts to further limit care for mental illness, as intended by this bill and its Church of Scientology-connected predecessors, represent a serious miscarriage of legislative responsibility and the untrained and unlicensed intrusion into the practice of medicine.

I am concerned by the large number of legislators who have previously been misled into passing Scientology-originated bills and I'm grateful that the governor has consistently vetoed those measures. It is especially loathsome that Johnson's current bill targets foster children, who are at especially high risk of mental illness related to a combination of genetic, toxic and environmental factors.

We have made great progress over the years in our understanding and treatment of mental-health problems. Beware of lobbies and legislators who try to bring us back to the dark ages.