The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.
In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.
This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.
For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.
The Mental Health Human Rights Declaration was developed to cover the rights that all should be given, and that the systemic abuse of African Americans and people of color warrants additional rights. Every man, woman and child of any race is entitled to basic human rights set forth in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“If we really want to get down to the root of why all these [police] killings are happening, this warrior training 100% has to be put under a microscope and analyzed… If cops got less of this training, less people would die. There's no question about that.” —Craig Atkinson, Filmmaker and director of Do Not Resist
Nulla vel sodales tellus, quis condimentum enim. Nunc porttitor venenatis feugiat. Etiam quis faucibus erat, non accumsan leo. Aliquam erat volutpat. Vestibulum ac faucibus eros. Cras ullamcorper gravida tellus ut consequat.
For those involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities and forcibly treated, it is an inhumane and unjustifiable curtailment of civil liberties. In 2020, CCHR’s Task Force Against Racism & Modern-Day Eugenics was formed, in part, to prevent such curtailment. Psychiatric institutionalization—including involuntarily—has led to African Americans being restrained and killed. Numerous international human rights treaties support a ban on forced hospitalization and coercive psychiatric practices, including restraint use. While some treaties may not be ratified and legally binding in U.S. law, they reflect the direction that mental health laws urgently need to go to instill human rights and protections.
Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics Joins Calls for APA President and Columbia University Psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman to Resign All Advisory and Executive Positions in Light of Blatant Racist Tweet
With a 50-year history of fighting against psychiatric racism in South Africa and the U.S., watchdog praises inquest after five years investigating 144 psychiatric patient deaths. Warns against SA patients being returned to past apartheid-entrenched facilities; effective medical facilities needed.