Rights group unveils global information center
he Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has launched a global information center on the World Wide Web in response to growing demands for information about violations of human rights by the psychiatric industry, and what can be done about the problem.
The unveiling of the new site follows a public education campaign in which more than 2 million copies of six CCHR booklets were distributed in seven languages and 16 countries. These publications can all be viewed at http://www.cchr.org.
Creating Racism: Psychiatry’s Betrayal traces the development and promotion by psychiatrists of stereotypes and racist ideology, and the direct, tragic effects upon society of these psychiatric theories.
Benjamin Rush, the racist known as the “father” of American psychiatry, whose face still appears on the seal of the American Psychiatric Association, asserted that the color of blacks stemmed from a disease called “negritude” which derived from leprosy; the evidence of a “cure” was when the skin turned white.
Another early doctor, Samuel Cartwright, claimed to have discovered two mental diseases peculiar to blacks which he believed justified their enslavement. He called these “drapetomania” and “dysaesthesia aethiopis.” The first term came from drapetes, a runaway slave, and mania, meaning mad or crazy. Cartwright claimed that this “disease” caused blacks to have an uncontrollable urge to run away from their “masters.” The “treatment” for this illness was “whipping the devil out of them.”
Dysaesthesia aethiopis supposedly affected both mind and body. The signs included disobedience, answering disrespectfully and refusing to work. The “cure” was to put the person to some kind of hard labor which apparently sent “vitalized blood to the brain to give liberty to the mind.”
Another booklet, Denying Respect: Psychiatry, Victimizing the Elderly, describes the harm inflicted upon seniors by the psychiatric industry. Basic human rights are denied people labeled “mentally disordered” or “senile,” or having Alzheimer’s disease. Denying Respect reveals how, over a 10-year period, more than 730,000 elderly died from reactions to prescription drugs – 12 times more deaths than the 58,000 soldiers killed during 10 years of the Vietnam War.
Betraying Women: Psychiatric Rape explains how a woman stands a greater chance of being raped on her psychiatrist’s couch than she would jogging at night through New York’s Central Park. Yet the betrayals that take place so often are a dirty little secret seldom mentioned in the media.
This booklet uncovers the epidemic of psychiatric rape and explains actions that women and law enforcement officials can take to prevent abuse.
Other publications in the series document and expose criminal aspects of the psychiatric industry for the first time:
- Destroying Lives: Psychiatry, Education’s Ruin
- Creating Crime: Psychiatry, Eradicating Justice
- Creating Chaos: Psychiatry, Destroying Morals
To obtain copies of the actual publications, write: Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Or call (800) 869-2247.
