2025: A Turning Point for Human Rights. CCHR Demands End to Coercive Psychiatry
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LOS ANGELES - Michimich -- By CCHR International

Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), the world's longest-running mental-health watchdog, says 2025 marked a turning point: global institutions, national governments, and the public are increasingly demanding an end to coercive psychiatric practices. But the group warns that the U.S. mental health system continues to lag far behind international human rights standards, and that 2026 must be the year these abusive practices are abolished.

In August, CCHR International President Jan Eastgate and Executive Director Fran Andrews addressed the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), urging decisive global action to prohibit involuntary psychiatric treatment. Their testimony centered on the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), including on children, and the catastrophic physical and psychological harm it inflicts. For CCHR, which has fought to expose ECT since 1969, it reaffirmed to the UN session a simple truth: a practice that can cause brain damage, memory loss, trauma, and death has no place in modern medicine.

Earlier in the year, Amalia Gamio, Vice Chair of the CRPD Committee, joined CCHR in Los Angeles to protest psychiatric coercion. "Involuntary medication, electroshock, even sterilization—these are inhuman practices… they constitute torture," she stated. "There is an urgent need to ban all coercive and non-consensual measures in psychiatric settings." CCHR says this level of clarity from UN leadership is essential for the sweeping reform now underway.

The momentum continued in November when a CCHR member delivered an address to the World Federation for Mental Health Congress in Barcelos, Portugal, urging global alignment with UN and World Health Organization (WHO) mandates to end coercion. CCHR emphasized that forced hospitalization. drugging, ECT, seclusion, and all forms of physical, mechanical, and chemical restraint violate the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, and are incompatible with a modern, rights-based mental health system.

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CCHR International joined its European chapters to help spearhead opposition to the Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention issued by the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine. The draft measure would have expanded involuntary commitment and treatment in direct violation of the CRPD.[1] On December 5, the Council of Europe's Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development acknowledged that UN agencies, civil and human rights bodies were correct: the protocol would have entrenched coercive practices and obstructed future abolition efforts.[2]

In New Zealand, CCHR's decades-long campaign to expose the electroshock torture of children at the now-closed Lake Alice psychiatric institution resulted in national recognition. CCHR New Zealand received the Mitre 10–Kiwibank Community of the Year Award for its work, and Victor Boyd—whose investigations in the 1970s helped shut down Lake Alice's child unit—was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, endorsed by the King.[3] CCHR International has long supported the New Zealand chapter in its efforts.

While the rest of the world advances human rights reform, the U.S. continues to allow psychiatric abuse, especially of children. CCHR International's extensive Freedom of Information Act investigations this year revealed staggering levels of psychotropic drugging among low-income children on Medicaid. Data from 32 states show:  2,999,084 children aged 0–17 were placed on psychiatric drugs at a cost of $1.7 billion.

CCHR flagged numerous extreme prescribers in one state alone, initiating formal complaints that have now triggered state and federal investigations.

Reports of abuse in psychiatric residential and behavioral facilities continue to surge nationwide. As documented by The New York Times, some chains have detained individuals until insurance benefits ran out—judges in several cases intervened to force patient release.[4] CCHR's monitoring and investigations have identified 123 closures of psychiatric hospitals treating minors since 2019, including nine facilities closed by Acadia Healthcare, one of the nation's largest chains.

This year, Utah established a Child Protection Ombudsman with authority to investigate psychiatric abuse. This was spearheaded by activist Paris Hilton and supported by CCHR. Maryland enacted a law banning physical restraint during child transport to facilities and empowered the Attorney General to act against violators.

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CCHR says these reforms reflect a growing understanding among lawmakers: coercion breeds harm, not healing.

Jan Eastgate stresses that U.S. psychiatry still refuses to support a zero-tolerance stance on coercive practices even though the World Psychiatric Association has pledged to move in that direction. The WHO and UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have stated unequivocally that coercive psychiatric practices must be eliminated.[5]

CCHR says the path forward is clear for 2026: Ban electroshock, psychosurgery, deep brain stimulation, and all invasive brain-intervention procedures used in psychiatry. Prohibit all forms of forced psychiatric detention and treatment; implement non-coercive, rights-based mental health services worldwide, and establish legal sanctions for violations.

Eastgate concludes: "Human rights are not negotiable. We must secure worldwide elimination of forced psychiatric detainment and treatment, and enact penalties for those who violate these rights. Coercive psychiatry belongs to the past. Our responsibility is to ensure it doesn't continue in the future."

About CCHR: The group was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry, the late Dr. Thomas Szsaz of State University of New York, who insisted that "mental hospitals are like prisons not hospitals, that involuntary mental hospitalization is a type of imprisonment not medical care, and that coercive psychiatrists function as judges and jailers not physicians and healers…."[6]

Sources:

[1] www.cchrint.org/2025/09/12/involuntary-commitment-americas-eugenics-past-repackaged-as-mental-health-care/

[2] "Draft Additional Protocol to the Convention on human rights and biomedicine (Oviedo Convention) concerning the protection of human rights and dignity of persons with regard to involuntary placement and involuntary treatment within mental healthcare services," Provisional Draft, Parliamentary Assembly, 5 Dec. 2025; europeantimes.news/2025/12/council-of-europe-assembly-unanimously-rejects-protocol-on-involuntary-measures-mental-health/

[3] www.cchrint.org/2025/07/25/cchrs-legacy-of-reform-exposing-abuse/

[4] www.cchrint.org/2024/10/18/cchr-backs-un-senate-calls-for-doj-action-on-coercive-psychiatric-practices/; Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, "How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients," The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/business/acadia-psychiatric-patients-trapped.html

[5] WHO, OHCHR, "Guidance on Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation," 9 Oct. 2023, pages 13, 15, 66

[6] www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/