�It is dishonest to pretend that caring coercively for the mentally ill invariably helps him, and that abstaining from such coercion is tantamount to �withholding treatment� from him�. All history teaches us to beware of benefactors who deprive their beneficiaries of liberty.�
� Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus

CHAPTER SIX Achieving Mental Health

The right to have a thorough, physical and clinical examination by a competent registered general practitioner of one�s choice, to ensure that one�s mental condition is not caused by any undetected and untreated physical illness, injury or defect, and the right to seek a second medical opinion of one�s choice,� is provided for in Article 3 of CCHR�s Declaration of Mental Health Rights.

CCHR has long been an advocate for competent, non-psychiatric, medical evaluation of people with alleged mental problems. Undiagnosed and untreated physical conditions can manifest as �psychiatric� symptoms. During 1982, CCHR campaigned for Senate Bill 929 in California, which established a pilot project to provide medical evaluation of people in public psychiatric hospitals. CCHR was represented on the advisory committee that was established to oversee the pilot. The findings, officially published in 1989, found that 39% of the more than 500 patients studied had a physical disease that had been undiagnosed by mental health professionals.

Charles B. Inlander, president of The People�s Medical Society, wrote in Medicine on Trial, �People with real or alleged psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed�and harmed�to an astonishing degree. � Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return.�

Through the broad dissemination of CCHR�s publications (books, newsletters, booklets and pamphlets) and its Internet site, more and more patients, families, professionals, lawmakers and countless other concerned citizens are becoming educated on the truth about psychiatry, and that something effective can and must be done about it.

CCHR�s publications show the destructive impact of psychiatry upon education, the welfare of women and children, racism, justice, morals, the elderly, religion, arts and society as a whole.

Johanna Reeve-Alexander, a doctor of nutrition at the Tara Health Center in Western Australia states, �I have seen within CCHR a committed, caring, humanitarian team of dedicated professional people who are helping to bring to light the appalling truth behind some psychiatric practices. � Without CCHR opening the gates and shining a torch on these practices via their literature, awareness campaigns, intervention at government levels and continual research, the public would be quite unaware of the malpractice at this level of medicine.�

�The main task of CCHR has been to achieve reform in the field of mental health and the preservation of the rights of individuals under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. CCHR has been responsible for many great reforms.�
� Erica-Irene Daes, special rapporteur in her report to the United Nations, 1986

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