Frequently Asked Questions Cont. 2

What does CCHR do?

Thousands of individuals contact CCHR each year to report psychiatric abuse and criminality, such as false imprisonment, hospital fraud, sexual abuse and inhumane treatment and conditions in psychiatric institutions. CCHR documents this and helps the abused individual file criminal or other complaints with the proper authorities. It also conducts investigations in wider psychiatric issues, such as insurance fraud, high death rates reported in institutions, or the fraudulent labeling of children as “mentallydisordered” and drugging millions.

Over a decade, CCHR’s investigations led to the prosecution of over a thousand psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health workers. This has prompted legislators and insurance companies to withdraw funding to criminal psychiatric practices, and to pass laws to protect individuals from them.

Through CCHR’s achievements, thousands of psychiatric victims have been rescued, patients have regained legal and civil rights, mental health acts have outlawed the arbitrary use of electroshock and psychosurgery and banned these savage practices on children, and legislation has been enacted to ensure psychiatric rape of patients is dealt with as a criminal offense. Many hundreds of survivors of psychiatric treatment have been compensated tens of millions of dollars for the damage they have suffered.

Is CCHR part of the Church of Scientology?

CCHR is an independent organization. It comprises members of the Church of Scientology and many other people of various denominations, faiths and cultural beliefs. Scientologists are not unique in their view that psychiatry is harmful. People from all walks of life are concerned about the destructive impact of psychiatry on society. They work with CCHR to do something effective about it. CCHR’s Board of Advisors—called “Commissioners”—include prominent doctors, lawyers, artists, educators, businessmen, civil and human rights representatives and professionals who see it as their duty to “expose and help abolish any and all physically damaging practices in the field of mental health.”

We are proud to have been founded by the Church of Scientology, which has a long and impressive history of human rights achievements. CCHR members work closely with Church members on social reform issues and consult with the Church’s social reform or human rights departments.

Why is Scientology opposed to psychiatry?

When the Church of Scientology established CCHR in 1969, victims of psychiatry had no rights and needed a voice. “Treatment” was brutal, its only purpose to create compliant patients. Patients were subjected to punitive electroshock—without anesthetic as punishment for “bad” behavior. Using lobotomies and other psychosurgical procedures, psychiatrists destroyed patients’ brains with callous disregard. Those under psychiatric “care” were mercilessly experimented upon with therapeutically unproven mind-altering drugs.

The founder of Scientology, Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, was the first to confront these desperate acts by psychiatrists. From the late 1940s, Mr. Hubbard saw psychiatry’s reckless abuse of the individual and its incompetence. Later, he wrote: “The Church of Scientology will not recommend or condone political mental treatment such as electric shocks and condemns utterly the fascist approach to ‘mental health’ by extermination of the insane.”

CCHR was formed to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights and to clean up the field of mental healing.

Does CCHR give medical or legal advice?

CCHR does not provide medical or legal advice. However, it works closely with attorneys and medical doctors and supports medical, but not psychiatric, practices.

Anyone who feels he or she is “mentally ill” should see a competent non-psychiatric medical doctor as numerous medical studies show undiagnosed and untreated physical complaints can manifest as a “psychiatric” problem. In many cases, once the physical condition is treated, the mental “disorder” symptoms disappear.

CCHR also strongly recommends that anyone who knows of someone who has, or has himself or herself been physically or sexually abused by a psychiatrist, file a complaint with the proper law enforcement body and/or licensing board.

Why should electroshock treatment (ECT) be banned?

Very simply, electroshock destroys minds and can kill. Touted by psychiatrists as “scientific” and “therapeutic,” ECT is as sophisticated and beneficial as hitting someone over the head with a sledgehammer. It consists of searing the brain with 180 to 460 volts of electricity. This causes a severe convulsion or a grand mal seizure identical to an epileptic fit.

Women and the elderly, in particular, are psychiatry’s principal targets. The death rate among the elderly from ECT is about one in every 200. A 1993 Texas government report found that one in 197 patients died within two weeks of receiving this “treatment.” Other studies document that electroshock inflicts irreversible brain damage, memory loss and a deterioration of intellectual ability.

Electroshock also has a sordid history as a weapon of torture and mind control.

When you deal with vulnerable people who are in desperate need of help, using ECT is not only betrayal, it is criminal assault. Electroshock should not be available as a choice, just as Thalidomide is not available to pregnant women. Psychiatrists who administer it for a living have a financial incentive to lie about its effects—in the United States alone it is a $3 billion-a-year industry. It takes government action to safeguard its citizens by outlawing ECT.

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