LOS ANGELES - AussieJournal -- The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a 55-year mental health industry watchdog based in the U.S., announced its win against an attempt to suppress its freedom of speech about psychiatric abuse and patients' rights in Spain. After a prolonged judicial battle, the group recently secured a judgment from the Supreme Court of Spain, resulting in a resounding defeat for a Spanish society of psychiatry who had claimed CCHR's publications, documentaries and websites in the U.S. and in Spain had adversely impacted their honor.[1] The court rejected this and affirmed CCHR's materials "deal with a matter of undoubted general interest" and their "content is directly connected to the public debate in a democratic society" and "in the social debate on psychiatry."

CCHR's educational campaigns feature materials based on documented evidence; statements from patients, experts and legislators; studies; media reports and commentaries on psychiatric human rights violations. The court determined: "The debate on certain psychiatric practices and, in particular, on involuntary institutionalization, use of psychotropic drugs, especially when the patients are children or adolescents, or surgical or electroconvulsive treatments, is of particular importance in today's society."

The court cited United Nations reports as "a good illustration of the important existing social, political and scientific debate on the issues" and emphasized that restricting such discourse "would imply an excessive restriction of freedom of expression that would not be justified by an imperative social need."

The European Times reported CCHR's websites in the U.S. and Spain contain "strong language against psychiatrists," exposing abuse and "unethical practices," and "in this battle between the right to honor and the right to freedom of expression, psychiatrists have lost."[2]

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CCHR, which was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry, the late Dr. Thomas Szasz, has an impressive history of securing rights denied patients. Dr. Szasz stated, "The task we set ourselves, to combat psychiatric coercion, is important. It is a noble task in the pursuit of which we must, regardless of obstacles, persevere."

Australian psychiatrist, Niall McLaren, said that CCHR's work is "essential if we are to counter the endless propaganda of dehumanizing psychiatry" and "the idea that unhappy or distressed young people must be stripped of their human rights and drugged into conformity."

Professor Lothar Krappmann, a former member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), stressed CCHR's strong research ethic: "If you point out that I have achieved something for the misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated children, then I must add that this was possible, because of the good information and documents I have received from CCHR."

The UNCRC had responded to CCHR's evidence with hearings held into the increasing rate of children labeled with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and drugged with psychostimulants. It recommended government "monitoring of the excessive use of psychostimulants to children" and an emphasis on using alternatives to drugs.

In the early 1970s, during apartheid South Africa, CCHR uncovered that psychiatrists had imprisoned 10,000 Blacks and exploited them as slave labor. CCHR reported this to the World Health Organization, which investigated the camps and in 1983 confirmed the allegations and reported that "in no other medical field…is the contempt of the person cultivated by racism, more precisely portrayed than in psychiatry." In 2001, a South African federal government official praised CCHR for its "courage, compassion and exemplary fight against apartheid psychiatry," which had "blatantly discriminated against Black people."

In Australia, CCHR successfully secured a ban on deep sleep therapy, a drug and electroshock practice that killed 48 patients. In 1990, a New South Wales government Royal Commission inquiry validated CCHR's tenacious efforts, with a leading lawyer also calling its work the "most sustained and thorough exercise in whistleblowing, investigatory reporting and public interest work in the history of this country – bar none!"

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It helped obtain a ban on the use of electroshock treatment on minors in Western Australia and four U.S. states.

In 2019, CCHR New Zealand obtained a UN Committee Against Torture to the condemnation of the electroshock torture of children at the now-closed Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital in the 1970s. In 2020, the UN forced the government to hold a Commission of Inquiry, when the NZ Solicitor-General conceded that the electroshock "treatment" administered to minors met the legal definition of torture.[3] Judge Coral Shaw, Chairperson of the Royal Commission, thanked CCHR for its "extraordinary efforts…to keep this flame alive on behalf of the survivors."[4]

In 2004, CCHR helped secure a U.S. Prohibition of Child Medication Safety law that banned schools from forcing schoolchildren to take psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their schooling.

Since 1974, CCHR Germany relentlessly documented the previously undisclosed role of Nazi psychiatrists in the murder of "mental patients" during the Holocaust. In 2010, the German psychiatric association acknowledged this, admitting that psychiatrists had forced patients "to be sterilized, arranged their deaths and even performed killings themselves. They also murdered physically and mentally disabled children in more than 30 psychiatric and pediatric hospitals." Their exhibit "Registered, persecuted, annihilated: the sick and the disabled under National Socialism," has been displayed globally.

CCHR helped secure 36 laws around the world making sexual abuse of patients by mental health practitioners a criminal offense.

According to Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR Int, "These are but a sample of the many psychiatric human rights abuses CCHR has exposed and worked to reform.  Spanish psychiatrists tried unsuccessfully to prevent public discussion of this.  Such suppression of information violates the informed consent rights of patients and their families. It contradicts recent World Health Organization and UN guidelines on mental health and human rights, which CCHR chapters are aligned with the world over in a commitment to end coercive psychiatric practices."

Sources:

[1] "The Supreme Court dismisses the claim for violation of the right to honor of the Spanish Society of Psychiatry for the criticism received from two associations," The First Chamber of the Supreme Court, 12 July 2024

[2] Juan Sanchez Gil, "Unsilenced: Psychiatric-abuses Watchdog Wins Supreme Court Battle in Spain," The European Times, 16 July 2024, europeantimes.news/2024/07/unsilenced-psychiatric-abuses-watchdog-wins-supreme-court-battle-in-spain/

[3] www.cchrint.org/2022/12/30/lake-alice-psychiatric-hospital-children-were-tortured/

[4] www.cchrint.org/2021/07/01/cchrs-work-acknowledged-nz-inquiry-lake-alice-psychiatric-child-torture/