Citizens Commission on Human Rights sees major gains for the protection of those abused by psychiatry.
Citizens Commission on Human Rights is expanding, with 174 CCHR chapters now active worldwide. Their work continues to extend on multiple fronts. The organization’s vigilance with the pharmaceutical industry resulted in 32 new warnings being mandated for psychiatric drugs in 2017. Since its inception in 1969, CCHR has been instrumental in the passage of 220 anti-psychiatry bills and quashing of 375 pro-psychiatry legislative bills. In the arena of government disciplinary enforcement, psychiatrists faced $33 billion in fines, legal damages and slashed funding tied to CCHR’s work. It was directly responsible for the license revocation of 140 individual psychiatrists, 124 in Japan alone, and imprisonment for seven more. On the public awareness front, CCHR members distributed 21 million informational handouts. The 20 CCHR Traveling Exhibits drew 135,800 visitors in 2017 while traversing 19,215 miles. The cumulative total is now over 400,000 miles—or 16 trips around the globe.
In 2017, Citizens Commission on Human Rights upped the ante in its ongoing effort to hold the psychiatric industry accountable for its devastating misdeeds. Finding the entire mental health system at fault for fraud and malfeasance, CCHR rededicated itself in the fights against electroshock therapy and the practice of prescribing psychiatric drugs to children.
Since its founding in 1969, the mental health watchdog has been working to protect the rights of patients and families. CCHR has also been preventing providers from defrauding Medicaid and Medicare, where in 2014 alone (the last year for which statistics are available), there was at least $148 million in fraud.
Citing the subjective and fraudulent nature of psychiatric diagnoses, since there is no objective blood test or imaging scan for the detection of mental illness, and the ease with which diagnoses can be changed to elicit more money from insurers, CCHR has urged healthcare workers with inside knowledge of fraud to take advantage of whistleblower protection laws and speak out.
The most explosive case is the ongoing, multiyear action against Universal Health Services, a mental health hospital operator with a history of dangerous and fraudulent medical and business practices. From April 2016 to April 2017, nearly 4,500 complaints were filed against UHS, most instigated by CCHR. To judge the scale of deceit perpetrated on the public, consider that just one UHS behavioral facility in Texas, thanks to CCHR diligence, agreed to pay the U.S. Government $860,000 to resolve False Claims Act allegations against it.
CCHR also keeps close track of legislative initiatives to limit psychiatric abuses, distributes educational materials worldwide, and in 2017, directly caused the arrest and/or decertification of 140 psychiatrists.
