Citizens Commission on Human Rights advocates the global adoption of international human rights standards that call for informed consent to mental health treatment and an end of coercive psychiatric practices.
-- During Mental Health Awareness Month, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is focusing on activities to ensure human rights in the field of mental health. This advocacy is consistent with new calls from the World Health Organization (WHO) for human rights-based mental health treatment based on informed consent and ending coercive psychiatric practices.
As a major focus of its national efforts, CCHR has committed to raising awareness of the abusive and costly practice of detaining people against their will in psychiatric facilities. Research indicates that involuntary psychiatric confinements have been increasing at three times the rate of the increase in population. It has been estimated that four of every ten admissions to psychiatric facilities are involuntary, a figure that reportedly rose by 27% over the last decade, according to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors.
Media investigations and U.S. Justice Department complaints have alleged that patients have been wrongly committed to psychiatric facilities, given unnecessary treatment that has harmed them, and their insurance fraudulently billed.
CCHR chapters around the world have for years complained to the proper authorities on behalf of individuals reporting to the organization that they were wrongly committed to a psychiatric facility, forced to take psychiatric drugs, held for long periods of time, traumatized by circumstances in the facilities, and released in worse condition than when they were first detained.
To restore human rights to the field of mental health, CCHR is actively raising awareness of the Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights and calling for its global adoption. This declaration, like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that inspired it, lays out fundamental human rights, but as specific to the field of mental health. These rights include the right to be treated with dignity, the right to fully informed consent to mental health treatment based on the full disclosure of risks, as well as the right to refuse consent and the right to know what alternative treatments are available.
WHO’s recently issued Guidance on Mental Health Policy and Strategic Action Plans forwards the organization’s push in recent years for person-centered care, based on informed consent, to replace involuntary psychiatric practices, which it has found are ineffective and can be harmful to mental health.
WHO further calls for an end to the overreliance on the biomedical model of psychiatry, which focuses on psychotropic drugs to reduce mental health symptoms, but ignores the important physical, social, and environmental factors that affect individuals’ mental health. WHO is promoting a shift to “approaches that are more person-centred, recovery-oriented, and grounded in human rights.”
CCHR has called on the American Psychiatric Association to renounce coercive psychiatric practices, in line with international human rights standards. These practices include involuntary institutionalization, involuntary medication, involuntary electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or electroshock), and physical, chemical and mechanical restraint.
CCHR exposes psychiatric violations of human rights through its traveling exhibit, displayed at venues that have included the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation annual legislative conference in Washington, DC. Research has found that people transported against their will for psychiatric evaluation are disproportionately Black people.
Most recently, CCHR provided testimony for a Maryland bill, now passed into law, that prohibits young people from being picked up in the middle of the night and having blindfolds, zip ties, and leather straps used on them during transport to residential behavioral treatment programs by for-profit transport services. Paris Hilton, who also testified in support of the bill, has been active in exposing the harm from residential treatment facilities and the transport services taking children to them, after being traumatized in such programs and transport as a teen.
To track the nation’s progress in eliminating unnecessary involuntary institutionalization and treatment, CCHR is calling for the national collection of data related to coerced psychiatric treatment. CCHR continues to advocate for laws to ensure human rights in the mental health system.
About the company: The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was co-founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and the late psychiatrist and humanitarian Thomas Szasz, M.D., recognized by many academics as psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, to eradicate abuses and restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health.
Contact Info:
Name: Anne Goedeke
Email: Send Email
Organization: Citizens Commission on Human Rights, National Affairs Office
Address: Washington, DC
Website: http://www.cchrnational.org
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ufOUHeS-ZY
Release ID: 89160076
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