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Are Coercive Psychiatric Practices the Hidden Human Rights Issue of Our Time?
A powerful exhibit by CCHR reveals the hidden human rights abuses behind coercive psychiatric practices still used today.
Citizens Commission on Human Rights’ exhibit exposes the history of harmful and racist practices in the mental health system that may constitute human rights violations, many of which are still being practiced to this day, and calls for laws to ban harmful practices, in line with international human rights standards.
Harmful and coercive practices in the mental health system were the focus of a global traveling exhibit by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). The exhibit was displayed recently at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation 54th Annual Legislative Conference.
Coercive mental health practices violate today’s international human rights standards, with the World Health Organization and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights calling for an end to all involuntary mental health treatment. CCHR advocates for state and federal laws to eliminate coercive commitment to psychiatric facilities and forced mental health treatment.
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The physical and psychological harm caused by coerced mental health treatment was the reason behind the 2023 call by the World Health Organization and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for nations to end all forced mental health treatment, the organizations saying that coercive practices “violate the right to be protected from torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”
The exhibit brings to light the long history of psychiatric practices and human rights violations. Some of those practices are still found in the mental health system today, including forcibly admitting people – even children – to psychiatric facilities, forcing them to take harmful drugs against their will, and subjecting them to seclusion and restraints, which have caused injury and death. Mental health patients can even be subjected to involuntary electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or electroshock).
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Facts presented in the CCHR exhibit also detailed the prime role of psychiatrists in promoting eugenics and in instigating and perpetuating the systemic racism still ingrained in today’s mental health system. In 2021, both the American Psychiatric and the American Psychological Associations confessed long histories of racial abuse and admitted that systemic racism is still embedded in their practices.
The exhibit was viewed by elected officials, civic leaders and other convention visitors from around the nation, with many people reaching out to CCHR for help in protecting mental health human rights in their states. Some had their own distressful stories of family members or friends who were harmed in the mental health system.
“Damaging and potentially fatal procedures that are passed off as mental health treatment must stop,” said Anne Goedeke, president of the CCHR National Affairs Office. “CCHR is dedicated to ending abusive psychiatric practices and restoring human rights to mental healthcare.”
CCHR is an international mental health industry watchdog co-founded by the Church of Scientology and the late psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry Thomas Szasz, M.D., recognized by many academics as modern psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, to eradicate abuse and restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health.
