Mental Health Abuse
Exposing the crimes of mental health practitioners

If mental health abuse is reported, we can help! If you or someone you know is a victim of abuse by a mental health practitioner, click on the box to the left.

The first step to correcting injustices and mental health abuse is to report them because something can be done about any situation. Your rights can be upheld, as our organization has shown over and over again.

Also, please join our News and Views Group by going to Mental Health Abuse Group and signing up.

On the left are links to 20 booklets documenting mental health abuse, and the background of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR).

Watchdog For Mental Health

In 1969, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) was established to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights and to clean up the field of mental healing. For well over a century, psychiatric theory had held that because neither spiritual matters nor the mind could be measured with physical instruments, they did not exist and had no place in mental health treatment.

Typical psychiatric practice meant that patients were treated like animals—they were stripped of their legal rights and possessions, brutalized and ware- housed in degrading conditions. Inmates were terrorized with electric shock treatment, often as punishment and without consent. Psychiatric lobotomies and other psychosurgical procedures destroyed minds and lives. Powerful neuroleptic (nerve seizing) drugs caused irreversible brain and nervous system damage making patients sluggish, apathetic and less alert. Furthermore, patients were assaulted and sexually abused—all under the guise of “therapy.” Any claim of a scientific basis was a hoax.

Consider the story of Hollywood actress Frances Farmer, who over a six-year period in the 1940s appeared in 18 films, three Broadway plays and 30 major radio shows, all before the age of 27. Then, suffering from a series of failed relationships and addicted to amphetamines for weight control, Farmer was admitted to a Washington State psychiatric hospital. Raped by orderlies, prostituted by hospital staff to soldiers from a nearby military base, locked in a cage, subjected to electro- and insulin shock treatments, given ice-cold “shock” baths, powerful, debilitating drugs and psychosurgery— Frances Farmer’s personality and career were destroyed.

Unlike many, Farmer survived and was able to tell of her experiences: “Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for it looms as large and as evil today as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam. But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some force for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate creatures who are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying institutions.”

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is that force.

Inspired by visionary humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard—who identified the abuse inherent in psychiatry’s acts when he said, “There must not be any influential group dedicated to man’s degradation,”—CCHR today is the preeminent international psychiatric watchdog.

Established by the Church of Scientology as an independent social reform group and co-founded by Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor emeritus of psychiatry, CCHR is responsible for many hundreds of international reforms gained through testimony before legislative hearings, its own public inquiries into psychiatric abuse, and its work with media, law enforcement and public officials.

This publication details some of the investigations, major changes and reforms CCHR has helped to bring about. Through CCHR’s diligence, thousands of victims of abuse have been rescued; patients have regained their legal and civil rights; mental health acts around the world have prohibited the arbitrary use of electroshock treatment, psychosurgery and banned deep sleep (narcosis) treatment and insulin shock. Legislation now exists to ensure psychiatric rape of patients is dealt with through the criminal courts, and many hundreds damaged by psychiatric “treatment” have been compensated.

Today, psychiatrists’ power to coerce parents into putting their children on very dangerous psychotropic drugs condemns us to a deepening drug culture and the subversion of the family unit. Seventeen million children worldwide are prescribed antidepressants that cause violent and suicidal behavior. This includes children younger than one year old who are now being prescribed mind-altering drugs. Millions more of our young are prescribed a stimulant that is more potent than cocaine. Therefore, CCHR’s job remains formidable and its watchdog role of preventing human rights abuses all the more vital.

For many psychiatric victims, CCHR is their only hope, the one group willing to listen that will  not attribute their very serious complaints to the “delusions” of “mental illness.” Through CCHR’s work, countless lives have been saved or salvaged from the personal degradation that follows in the wake of psychiatric treatment. Today, CCHR proudly continues its watchdog role with over 130 chapters in more than 30 countries numbers that keep growing year after year in what is nothing less than a global fight for the dignity and decency of man. More vital than ever, CCHR’s work will only be complete when psychiatry’s fraudulent practices are eliminated and it is held accountable for its harmful treatments and human rights violations.

Sincerely,

Jan Eastgate
President,
Citizens Commission on
Human Rights International

IMPORTANT NOTICE
For the Reader

The psychiatric profession purports to be the sole arbiter on the subject of mental health and “diseases” of the mind. The facts, however, demonstrate otherwise:

1. PSYCHIATRIC “DISORDERS” ARE NOT MEDICAL DISEASES.

In medicine, strict criteria exist for calling a condition a disease: a predictable group of symptoms and the cause of the symptoms or an understanding of their physiology (function) must be proven and established. Chills and fever are symptoms. Malaria and typhoid are diseases. Diseases are proven to exist by objective evidence and physical tests. Yet, no mental “diseases” have ever been proven to medically exist.

2. PSYCHIATRISTS DEAL EXCLUSIVELY WITH MENTAL “DISORDERS,” NOT PROVEN DISEASES.

While mainstream physical medicine treats diseases, psychiatry can only deal with “disorders.” In the absence of a known cause or physiology, a group of symptoms seen in many different patients is called a disorder or syndrome. Harvard Medical School’s Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., says that in psychiatry, “all of its diagnoses are merely syndromes [or disorders], clusters of symptoms presumed to be related, not diseases.” As Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus, observes, “There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases.”

3. PSYCHIATRY HAS NEVER ESTABLISHED THE CAUSE OF ANY “MENTAL DISORDERS.”

Leading psychiatric agencies such as the World Psychiatric Association and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health admit that psychiatrists do not know the causes or cures for any mental disorder or what their “treatments” specifically do to the patient. They have only theories and conflicting opinions about their diagnoses and methods, and are lacking any scientific basis for these. As a past president of the World Psychiatric Association stated, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future, the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.”

4. THE THEORY THAT MENTAL DISORDERS DERIVE FROM A “CHEMICAL IMBALANCE” IN THE BRAIN IS UNPROVEN OPINION, NOT FACT.

One prevailing psychiatric theory (key to psychotropic drug sales) is that mental disorders result from a chemical imbalance in the brain. As with its other theories, there is no biological or other evidence to prove this. Representative of a large group of medical and biochemistry experts, Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain says: “[T]here are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person’s brain.”

5. THE BRAIN IS NOT THE REAL CAUSE OF LIFE’S PROBLEMS.

People do experience problems and upsets in life that may result in mental troubles, sometimes very serious. But to represent that these troubles are caused by incurable “brain diseases” that can only be alleviated with dangerous pills is dishonest, harmful and often deadly. Such drugs are often more potent than a narcotic and capable of driving one to violence or suicide. They mask the real cause of problems in life and debilitate the individual, so denying him or her the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future.

This publication was made possible by a grant from the United States International Association of Scientologists Members’ Trust. Published as a public service by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

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