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Citizens Commission on Human Rights has campaigned for three decades for human rights
hen talk turns to human rights, one would normally expect events in places such as the former Yugoslavia, China or Rwanda to dominate the discussion. One would little expect to hear of atrocious abuses at home in the United States or even in other “developed” nations. And certainly not at the hands of trusted, degree-holding professionals who walk freely among us.
Yet such abuses exist; they are very real, and they are the focus of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a group dedicated to investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights. “To say that psychiatry violates human rights is a misnomer,” says Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Syracuse. “Psychiatry is a human rights abuse.”
Szasz, himself trained in psychiatry and author of the leading texts critical of the field, worked with the Church of Scientology in 1969 to found CCHR. At that time, according to a CCHR report, the victims of psychiatry were a “forgotten minority group, warehoused under dreadful, even terrifying conditions” in institutions around the world. Today a leading and powerful voice for mental health reform, with recognitions from a special rapporteur report to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and other private and governmental bodies, CCHR is now active with 130 chapters in 30 countries.
CCHR has campaigned for human rights in the field of mental health for three decades and has been recognized in Australia, Italy, South Africa, the United States and many other countries for its work to eradicate psychiatric violations of human dignity and rights.
Among CCHR’s accomplishments:
- CCHR members and Freedom reporters investigated and exposed in the 1970s the existence of slave labor camps in apartheid South Africa, where tens of thousands of black mental patients were being warehoused and exploited as cheap labor. The World Health Organization, the Red Cross and other bodies conducted independent investigations confirming the findings.
- CCHR uncovered and exposed the nightmare of “deep sleep therapy” in Australia—a bizarre and brutal “treatment” using drugs and electric shock which killed or permanently incapacitated scores of patients. A Royal Commission of Inquiry investigated and as a result, the practice of “deep sleep” was banned in the 1980s.
- CCHR has investigated barbaric and filthy conditions in psychiatric asylums in Italy. As a result of CCHR’s investigations, government bodies throughout the country ordered the closure of 90 asylums over the past two decades—following 18 raids, 50 complaints and 25 parliamentary investigations.
- CCHR members have been responsible for the passage of more than 100 laws protecting the rights of mental patients—including laws forbidding the use of electroshock therapy without consent, or its use at all on children and the elderly.
- CCHR contributed to Resolution 1235 of the Council of Europe on psychiatry and human rights, which reinforces the rights of patients to protect them from sexual abuses by psychiatric practitioners, and which brings attention to the involvement of psychiatry in “ethnic cleansing.”
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CCHR has been recognized internationally for its work to eradicate psychiatric violations of human dignity and rights.
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- CCHR has campaigned in the United States to end deaths and injuries caused by the use of physical restraints on mental patients. Those efforts were instrumental in bringing about national regulations in 1999 preventing the abusive use of restraints in all federally funded institutions.
- CCHR has been at the forefront of efforts to bring increased public attention to the dangers of dosing children with psychiatric drugs.
For more information, contact Citizens Commission on Human Rights at (800) 869-2247 or visit http://www.cchr.org
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