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| photo credit: Institute for Justice/AP |
about their “highly spoiled underachiever,” the chair of the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology sent a cease-and-desist letter to syndicated parenting advice columnist John Rosemond.
What was Rosemond's crime? He told the parents they should take away electronic devices and suspend privileges until the child improved his grades.
According to former child psychologist Kerby Neill, who lives in Kentucky, this was the ultimate sin.
Here's what he said:
“If I was a physician, and I got a letter from someone I didn’t know, asking me to help them with an issue they described in cursory fashion in a letter, and I sent them a prescription for a medicine that had disastrous results, I would be hard-pressed to use free speech to justify what I’ve done. He does not know if this child is on drugs, if the child is clinically depressed, if the child will respond to this advice by becoming suicidal.
So telling a spoiled kid he can no longer have his electronic gadgets or the use of other privileges has the potential to become suicidal. That's his conclusion?
What's the real issue? Rosemond actually tries to help people before they reach the stage of having to go to a psychiatrist. That's no different than someone eating better or exercising to prevent disease. It's about psychiatrists losing patients. You know, the people that get a piece of the action for pumping people up on legal drugs.
Jeff Rowes, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, who has filed suit on behalf of Rosemond, sheds humorous light on the silliness of the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology in its attempt to forbid competition in the state.
“If John Rosemond is a criminal, than Dear Abby was on a 50-year crime spree,” Rowe says. “And Dr. Phil can be banned by the air waves, and Dr. Oz should be sentenced to hard labor.”
Is this what Kentucky and America is coming to, where free speech and helping someone is now considered a crime?
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