Historically, psychiatry’s treatment methods have nullified and controlled the individual by violence and force. Children today are still placed in straitjackets and shackled to beds. After CCHR presented its material to international human rights bodies such as the United Nations, in 1991 the General Assembly of the U.N. finally adopted principles and guidelines (top) to protect people labelled “mentally ill.”

There are few abuses that deny freedom of speech more absolutely than the deprivation of liberty, not for any crime, but for one’s political or religious opinions. By inventing the term “sluggish schizophrenia” to describe political dissidents, Russian psychiatrists gave the former Soviet Union a spurious justification for wrongly incarcerating 40 million citizens. Since the fall of communism, many efforts to right this situation have been undertaken. In a 1999 press conference in Moscow, and in subsequent publications and exhibits which have reached hundreds of thousands, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) joined with author and investigator Anatoli Prokopenko and forwarded his call for all Soviet psychiatric records to be made public and for the “medical rehabilitation” of Soviet dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric institutions. This campaign continues to this day.

In 1969, the Church of Scientology fought to protect the rights of a Hungarian refugee named Victor Gyory, who had been “involuntarily committed” to a psychiatric hospital outside his native land, stripped naked, held in isolation and forced to undergo electric shock — all while being denied an attorney. When finally examined by a competent physician, it turned out that Gyory’s “mental disorder” was a simple matter of being unable to speak English. CCHR prepared to take Gyory’s case to court, at which point the hospital director discharged him.

Since CCHR obtained Gyory’s release, exposing the unconstitutionality, discrimination and human rights violations inherent in mental health “involuntary commitment” laws has become one of CCHR’s most important missions. CCHR found that “involuntary commitment” for many patients was a black hole from which they never emerged.

In the early 1980s, CCHR began to investigate the abusive involuntary commitment practices in France. In 1985, CCHR obtained through France’s Freedom of Information law, an official report which revealed that 45% of persons in psychiatric hospitals had, in fact, no “mental disorder” whatsoever, and should not have been there. CCHR’s exposure of this report, which France’s Ministry of Health and the Inspector General for Social Affairs had attempted to suppress, led to national media and stirred outrage by human rights advocates throughout the country. With the support of several MPs, CCHR demanded a reform of involuntary commitment laws, which eventually took place in 1990. Patients faced with the prospect of being committed now have the right to contact a lawyer, to send and receive mail, and other basic rights. CCHR has not let up, however, and continues to expose any new violations of this right and to demand further reforms.

In Italy in the 1990s, CCHR joined with Members of Parliament to conduct surprise inspections of psychiatric institutions to expose abusive conditions. What they found reminded the inspectors of concentration camps: patients were forced to live no better than animals, lying in their own faeces, neglected and abused. As a result of CCHR’s work and the widespread media coverage about the abuses uncovered by CCHR, these institutions are now shut down and the patients have been provided proper medical care.

In the course of investigating psychiatric infliction of human misery in the United States, CCHR documented that, between 1950 and 1964 alone, more people died in psychiatric hospitals in the United States than the total number of Americans killed in the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam and both Gulf Wars, all combined.

In 1998 and 1999, working with legislators and media, CCHR exposed an even greater human rights travesty— that restraints used in psychiatric hospitals cause as many as 150 deaths of patients each year in the United States. Responding to the public scandal that ensued, the U.S. government adopted regulations prohibiting the use of physical and chemical (drugs) restraints to coerce or discipline psychiatric patients. The regulation also ordered a “national reporting system” to be implemented and government funding cut to any facility that did not abide by the regulations.

Freedom magazine is playing its part in helping safeguard citizens from the chilling effect of litigation brought by government officials and organisations....

One of CCHR’s original goals in 1969 was to secure the protection of the mentally ill through an international Bill of Rights. To accomplish this, CCHR presented its material to international human rights bodies such as the United Nations over a period of many years. In 1991, the General Assembly of the U.N. finally adopted principles and guidelines to protect people labelled “mentally ill.” This long overdue enactment called upon nations throughout the world to restore human rights “through appropriate legislative, judicial, administrative, education and other measures.”

Equal protection under the law, along with freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, constitute two stable pillars of human liberties. By effectively thwarting coercive civil commitment procedures, Scientologists stand as a bulwark between beleaguered individuals and those who, by robbing citizens of their dignity, strip away their most fundamental rights.