Standing Up for Human Rights:
Social Reform

Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)

As early as 1950, L. Ron Hubbard brought to light the savage abuses taking place in the field of mental healing, a field in which psychiatrists relied on electric shock, lobotomy and powerful mind-bending drugs to control human behavior in the name of help. Nor did it take Scientologists long to realize that it was harmful to force an ice pick or thousands of volts of electricity through the brain, or to flood the body with psychotropic drugs, and that this travesty of help was nothing less than betrayal of the worst kind.

What also soon became obvious was that psychiatry had no proven methods to justify the billions of dollars of funds governments poured into its coffers. But perhaps because of these very dollars, it was also a field which refused to institute reforms or take responsibility for its actions.

Scientologists became outspoken critics of these abuses of the helpless and, by the mid-1950s, they mobilized to defeat what was dubbed “The Siberia Bill.” Officially named the Alaska Mental Health Bill, this was psychiatry's attempt to establish a million-acre Siberia-type camp for mental health patients in Alaska, far from the prying eyes of civil libertarians. Incorporated in the bill was a “simplified commitment procedure.”

A less-than-alert Congress passed the bill unanimously in January 1956, but a massive campaign by Scientologists and civil rights groups ultimately eviscerated it.

Scientologists continued to speak out, but by 1969 it became obvious that self-imposed reforms in that field would never happen. (In fact, there was a resurgence of the more harmful practices and new and more powerful drugs were being developed as fast as they could be patented.) The Church thus formalized its opposition and formed the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). Headquartered in California, CCHR has grown to 118 chapters in 27 nations. For more than 25 years, CCHRs have successfully exposed psychiatric murders, hospital fraud, sexual abuse and inhumane conditions in mental institutions, and have been instrumental in passing legislation protecting the civil rights of mental patients.

In the 1970s, CCHR provided California legislators with documents and witnesses which led to the exposure of more than 100 unreported deaths at two State psychiatric institutions.

A 10-year CCHR probe of the Chelmsford psychiatric hospital in Sydney, Australia, revealed that scores of patients had died due to “deep sleep” — a drug-induced comatose state during which electric shock was adminstered. After a Royal Commission enquiry, sweeping reforms of Australia's psychiatric industry came about, including a ban on deep sleep “therapy.”

In Italy, several mental institutions described by media as “worse than concentration camps where patients lived no better than animals” have been shut down due to CCHR's efforts. And in the United States, CCHR has contributed to legislation criminalizing psychiatric rape in more than a dozen states.

In the 25 years since it began, CCHR has become recognized as a relentless and effective foe of psychiatric barbarism in many countries, successfully exposing psychiatric abuses and pressing for reforms.

A United Nations report issued in 1986 on the subject of the human rights of mental patients stated, “CCHR has been responsible for many great reforms. At least 30 bills throughout the world, which would otherwise have inhibited even more the rights of mental patients, or would have given psychiatry the power to commit minority groups and individuals against their will, have been defeated by CCHR actions.”

Due to CCHR's efforts, the United Nations finally adopted a universal bill of rights for mental patients in December 1991. It called on all nations to restore human rights “through appropriate legislative, judicial, administrative, education and other measures.”

While this was a major step forward, CCHR will continue to ensure that justice takes place wherever violations of these basic human rights occur.

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