Involuntary Commitment

Some of the worst human rights atrocities in the world are committed inside psychiatric institutions funded by governments.

Psychiatric Asylums

Instead of receiving comfort and proper care, patients are detained, some against their will, restrained, drugged, sexually abused, beaten, denied medical care, experimented upon and locked up in isolation.

Between 1950 and 1963, as many as 1,600 patients died each year in St Elizabeth’s State Psychiatric Hospital in Washington DC. While many bodies were simply buried in unmarked graves, thousands more of these deaths went unrecorded while the bodies were kept for experiments: 15,000 brain specimens, including 1,400 preserved, intact brains were stored in a government warehouse.

In the 1990s, Italy’s psychiatric asylums were exposed for forcing patients to live in conditions resembling those of concentration camps. Thousands were locked naked in filthy rooms.

Similar conditions were found in Russia.

In Mexico, patients have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions for as long as 30 years. In one Mexican institution, 110 patients were left in the care of a single nurse. Patients were found naked, huddled together for warmth.

Deadly Restraints

Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Clark reported that patients in American Institutions are often provolked in order to justify placing them in restraints, for which higher insurance reimbursements accrue - at least $1,000 a day. This can reap as much as $18 million in additional income each year for all such facilities combined. In addition, psychiatric staffs often resort to violent restraint procedures that can be fatal; however those responsible are rarely criminally charged.

CCHR helps Committed Patients

No matter how rich or poor the country, psychiatrists have found ways to exploit governments and abuse patients. Patients in Czech and Hungarian institutions were imprisoned in caged beds. CCHR, human rights groups and the European Parliament brought joint pressure to outlaw the practice and in 2004 Hungary and the Czech Republic banned the use of caged beds.

Community Mental Health

In 1963, the United States psychiatric research body, National Institute of Mental Health, under psychiatrist Robert Felix, implemented a community health programme that relied heavily on the use of mind-altering psychiatric drugs. Spawning an international trend, it send drugged patients onto the streets, homeless and incapable.

After huge financial investment - $47 billion spent on Community Mental Health between 1969 and 1994 alone - the programme is clearly a complete failure.

Psychiatry is moving to failed Community Mental Health programmes

Notwithstanding this, Community Mental Health programmes are the future psychiatry is moving towards as asylums close and psychiatry’s drugged victims are pushed out into the community.

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