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Marches for Human Rights

Since 1969, CCHR has used marches and peaceful demonstrations to draw public attention to psychiatry’s abuses and the need for government or police action. Thousands of concerned individuals have participated in these events which garnered tremendous public support.

ATLANTA - 2005

Atlanta - 2005
Celebrities Danny Masterson, Marisol Nichols and Michelle Stafford joined civic and state leaders, parents and children to protest the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) plans to screen all 52 million U.S. schoolchildren for "mental disorders" through universal mental health screenings, despite the lack of medical or scientific evidence establishing the validity of psychiatry's "disorders."
 
NEW YORK CITY - 2004

New York City - 2004
With national alarm over suicidal effects of antidepressants on children, CCHR organized hundreds of protestors who charged psychiatrists with creating the child drugging epidemic and downplaying risks of deadly drugs. Psychiatrists in New York City attending the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association were met by parents, children and human rights activists wearing black T-Shirts stating, "Psychiatry is Killing Your Children."
 
SAN FRANCISCO - 2003

San Francisco, USA - 2003
Outside the APA's annual convention, celebrities Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley, Lynsey Bartilson and Jennifer Aspen joined parents whose children had died from psychiatric drugs. Together they protested APA opposition to a federal bill, the Child Medication Safety Act of 2003, which would protect children from enforced psychiatric drugs in schools. National media ensued. Two days later the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 425 to 1.
 
TOKYO, JAPAN - 2002

Tokyo, Japan - 2002
Hundreds of CCHR marchers joined with other concerned groups to expose psychiatry's failures and violations of human rights at the World Psychiatric Association's international congress in Yokohama. Marchers demanded that psychiatry take responsibility for societal decline due to its unscientific "treatments" before getting any more funding or government support.
 
RUSSIA - 2002

Russia - 2002
CCHR has held various marches highlighting the punitive psychiatric abuses still occurring in Russia. Soviet psychiatrists remain in power in Russia and patients are forced into institutions, children are being drugged, and in St. Petersburg, its "Brain Institute" is illegally performing psychosurgery on drug addicts.
 
PARIS, FRANCE - 2000

Paris, France - 2000
Coercive commitment procedures have escalated in recent years in France. That country also has one of the highest rates of prescribed psychotropic drug use in the world. CCHR France, held a human rights march against several psychiatric hospitals for their use of involuntary commitment. The march also promoted the need to change involuntary commitment laws.
 
HAMBURG, GERMANY - 1999

Hamburg, Germany - 1999
CCHR organized a march of 2,000 people against the World Psychiatric Association's international congress in Hamburg, Germany, protesting German psychiatry's role in causing and maintaining the Holocaust. Over 300,000 falsely labeled "mentally ill" individuals were killed in the Nazi psychiatric system, yet none of their surviving family members have been compensated.
 
WASHINGTON, DC. - 1999

Washington D. C., 1999
This march took place in the wake of the Littleton, Colorado, high school massacre. Following the revelation that ringleader Eric Harris was taking a violence-inducing antidepressant, thousands protested outside the American Psychiatric Association about psychiatric drugs creating "kid killers." Celebrities Lisa Marie Presley, Kirstie Alley, Juliette Lewis, Doug E. Fresh and Michelle Stafford lent their support. International media coverage resulted, raising public awareness about the dangers of psychiatric treatment of children.
 
PERSHING SQUARE, LOS ANGELES - 1998

Pershing Square, LA - 1998
More than 2,500 citizens attended CCHR's march against the fraudulent labeling and drugging of schoolchildren. One parent detailed the tragic story of his son hanging himself while withdrawing from a stimulant. The father received no warning that suicidal tendencies were a side effect of the drug's withdrawal. Actors Nancy Cartwright (The Voice of Bart Simpson), Marisol Nichols and Jason Lee, and performers David Pomeranz and Raven Kane Campbell supported the march.
 
WASHINGTON, D.C. - 1998

Washington D. C., 1998
CCHR held a counter-march to several psychiatric front groups' "Walk the Walk" march in Washington, D.C. These groups misappropriated $200,000 of taxpayers' money for a walk aimed at influencing federal legislation that would increase insurance coverage for psychiatric treatment. Promoted as "celebrating mental health," CCHR exposed that it was limited to those organizations representing psychiatric interests and failed to encompass the many families and children harmed by psychiatric treatment.


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