Reflecting on the progress made against coercive psychiatric practices and obtaining child protections in 2024, CCHR commits itself in 2025 to reinforcing the need to end psychiatric abuse, including the drugging and restraining of children and youths.
By Jan Eastgate
President CCHR International
January 3, 2025
Recapping key events in 2024, we spotlight CCHR’s own efforts and those of other groups to investigate and expose psychiatric human rights violations in the U.S. and worldwide. We also reaffirmed our commitment to eliminating coercive psychiatric practices in the year ahead, including reinforcing and expanding on protections needed for children against psychiatric drug and restraint use. In September, Amalia Gamio, an expert consultant to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, emphasized the significance of a recent CCHR court victory in Spain, stating it had “set an international precedent in disseminating the abuses that occur in psychiatry to the world….”[1]
The very next month the international group, Human Rights Watch, wrote of the need to “confront a troubling reality: the mental health landscape is shifting in harmful ways in parts of Canada and the United States with the prospect of more coercive measures such as involuntary treatment and the elimination of vital support services.” The group further noted, “These coercive measures would violate rights to liberty and nondiscrimination and infringe on people’s autonomy.” It highlighted how California and New York “have adopted and expanded policies of coercive and involuntary treatment. Cities like New York and San Francisco have expanded involuntary psychiatric care often as part of a flawed response to people living on the streets,” and “these shifts toward mandatory treatment deepen the stigma around mental health conditions and often worsen health outcomes.”[2]
Those worsening outcomes are particularly evident in for-profit residential psychiatric hospitals, “troubled teen” behavioral facilities, and wilderness treatment camps. Senator Ron Wyden, who led a Senate Finance Committee investigation into the warehousing of youths in such facilities, wrote to the Department of Justice last year, urging an investigation into four of the nation’s largest operators of youth residential treatment facilities for civil rights violations and fraud. As NBC News reported, the letters were “sparked by a wave of activism by former patients and news articles detailing allegations of maltreatment within some facilities….”[3] In December, Congress enacted the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act aimed at increasing oversight of this area.
In June 2024, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) under the Department of Health and Human Services issued a damning report on the inadequate protection of foster care children in residential behavioral treatment centers. The report said, “Policymakers, news media, and advocacy groups have raised concerns about the effectiveness of oversight efforts to protect children in these settings.” It also highlighted states’ limited awareness of maltreatment that occurred across chains of residential facilities operating in multiple states and called for urgent reforms.[4]
Instances of abuse and neglect (collectively referred to as maltreatment) were exposed as occurring in residential facilities, including cases of physical violence, sexual assault, and improper restraints across nationwide chains of facilities. The OIG reported, “States oversee residential facilities, and ACF [Administration for Children and Families] provides funding and oversight to States for children in foster care who meet certain eligibility requirements.”
The American Bar Association addressed the failure to protect foster care children. “Every day, thousands of children in foster care are administered powerful psychotropic medications. The federal government has coined this phrase with respect to the use of psychotropic medications for children in foster care—‘too much, too many, too young’—acknowledging a variety of ways in which the lack of oversight of psychotropic medications harms children.”[5]
CCHR has consistently exposed the harm to youths treated in behavioral facilities, including being subjected to psychotropic drugs and potentially lethal restraint use. Because, as children, they are unable to consent, any treatment given to them constitutes coercive psychiatric practices.
The closure of 10 “wilderness therapy camps” for youths between 2023 and 2024 marks a promising and necessary trend. One such camp in North Carolina came to national attention when, on February 3, 2024, a 12-year-old was fatally restrained. This prompted swift government action: all children were removed from the facility, admissions were halted, and by May 17, the camp’s license was revoked, leading to its closure.
Changes in the mental health system often occur due to the efforts of groups like CCHR, along with other advocacy and disability rights organizations, media and legislators—efforts that reflect poorly on the mental health profession.
In December, Psychiatric Times published the article, “The Horror of Unjust Psychiatric Hospitalization” commenting on a hard-hitting series by two New York Times reporters in 2024. The series exposed abuses and fraud at residential psychiatric facilities owned by Acadia Healthcare, a nationwide for-profit behavioral treatment company. As the Times boldly summarized, “Acadia has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will….” The psychiatrist who authored the Psychiatric Times article conceded that “Keeping a well person locked in a hospital and taking away their privacy and autonomy” is something to which “we psychiatrists ought to stand up and demand better….” Further, where allegations are proven true, “then it is the duty of all psychiatrists to demand… accountability.” However, he admitted there has been little if any, outrage shown within the ranks of psychiatry: “Anything other than an energetic response to such reports implicitly tells the public that we… are not… interested in the way patients are treated.” He summated: “I wonder: How will psychiatrists… respond? More fundamentally, will psychiatrists respond at all?”[6]
Unlike those practicing within the mental health treatment industry, CCHR and other external advocates have consistently demanded stronger patient protections. Last year, United Nations agencies reiterated their condemnation of mandated psychiatric treatments, including electroshock and involuntary detainment in mental hospitals, declaring such practices to be forms of torture. Electroshock without anesthesia, forcibly administered to children in New Zealand, was officially recognized as “torture,” leading to apologies in November from seven government agencies and the country’s Prime Minister to the survivors. A National Remembrance Day will be held on November 12, 2025, to mark the one-year anniversary of the apology.[7] This recognition follows a 40-year battle led by CCHR, other advocacy groups, and the survivors themselves.
Building on these important victories, CCHR says some psychiatrists are now recognizing a decline in the use of electroshock treatment in the U.S., with a likely end to it completely. CCHR is reinforcing its campaign to ban the procedure due to its long-term adverse effects and lack of clinical trials that have proven its safety and efficacy.
This growing momentum against electroshock is further supported by recent governmental scrutiny. Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus Waste Report criticized nearly $11 million in Department of Defense spending on electroshock experiments, portraying it as a prime example of government waste and questioning the ethics and necessity of such expenditures.[8]
CCHR concurs with Human Rights Watch, which said that better solutions are needed “that are consent-based, trauma-informed, and focused on human rights.”[9]
In 1986, a UN Special Rapporteur described CCHR’s impact in obtaining laws to protect patients, stating that without these, psychiatric practices would have “inhibited even more the rights of patients or would have given psychiatry the power to commit minority groups and individuals against their will.”[10] Thirty-eight years later, UN representatives were still touting CCHR’s impact with the Spanish Supreme Court determining that CCHR’s materials “deal with a matter of undoubted general interest,” are “directly connected to the public debate in a democratic society,” and contribute to the “social debate on psychiatry.”
Furthermore, “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.”[11]
CCHR’s co-founder, professor of psychiatry, Thomas Szasz proudly stated: “I have never [involuntarily] committed anyone. I have never given electric shock. I have never, ever, given drugs to a mental patient.”[12] It is a legacy that the mental health-psychiatric system today needs to be constantly reminded of, which CCHR is committed to doing throughout the new year.
References:
[1] Letter to CCHR from Amalia Gamio, Independent Expert in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Vice-Chair of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 27 Sept. 2024
[2] Samer Mascati, “Championing Support Over Coercion on World Mental Health Day,” Human Rights Watch, 10 Oct. 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/10/championing-support-over-coercion-world-mental-health-day
[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/10/18/cchr-backs-un-senate-calls-for-doj-action-on-coercive-psychiatric-practices/ citing: Tyler Kingkade, “Senator urges DOJ to investigate youth treatment centers after probe uncovers ‘rampant abuse,” NBC News, 9 Oct. 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/senator-urges-doj-investigate-youth-treatment-centers-rcna174340
[4] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/07/05/foster-care-children-vulnerable-to-maltreatment/ citing: Ann Maxwell, Deputy Inspector General for Evaluation and Inspections, “Many States Lack Information To Monitor Maltreatment in Residential Facilities for Children in Foster Care,” Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, June 2024, OEI-07-22-00530, https://oig.hhs.gov/documents/evaluation/9920/OEI-07-22-00530.pdf
[5] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/07/05/foster-care-children-vulnerable-to-maltreatment/ citing: Elizabeth Pitman Gretter, “Too Much, Too Many, Too Young: Youth Assent to Psychotropic Medication in Foster Care Is a Basic Human Right,” American Bar Association, 12 Oct. 2021, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/empowering-youth-at-risk/too-much-too-many-too-young/
[6] Daniel Morehead, “The Horror of Unjust Psychiatric Hospitalization,” Psychiatric Times, 5, Dec. 2024, https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-horror-of-unjust-psychiatric-hospitalization
[7] Adam Pearse, “$150k redress payments for Lake Alice survivors unveiled,” NewstalkZB, 18 Dec. 2024, https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/redress-payment-scheme-for-lake-alice-torture-survivors-revealed-by-govt/
[8] “Senator Rand Paul Unveils 2024 Festivus Waste Report,” The Pinnacle Gazette, 25 Dec. 2024, https://evrimagaci.org/tpg/senator-rand-paul-unveils-2024-festivus-waste-report-112471
[9] Samer Mascati, “Championing Support Over Coercion on World Mental Health Day,” Human Rights Watch, 10 Oct. 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/10/championing-support-over-coercion-world-mental-health-day
[11] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/07/19/spanish-court-upholds-cchrs-campaigns-as-vital/
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