Most people today have difficulty understanding the destructive impact that psychiatry is having on communities around the world. For far too many people, the lesson is learned only after a psychiatrist has destroyed some part of their life.

The destruction might come in the form of the death of their child due to long-term usage of a stimulant drug, prescribed for an invented psychiatric disorder called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It could be a murderous school campus assault by a gun-toting teenager who had been prescribed a violence-inducing psychiatric drug and/or undergone death education or anger management classes such as in the Columbine school massacre in 1999. Perhaps the death of a frail elderly relative from electroshock treatment or an antipsychotic drug prescribed at a nursing home.

It could be a child was labeled mentally ill early in school, prescribed addictive, psychotropic drugs, who later becomes a hard-core street-drug addict because he could not tell the difference between a street drug and drugs prescribed him that are more potent than cocaine.

At CCHR, we work continuously to educate you on the truth about psychiatry and to provide information that psychiatrists would prefer you didn’t have. For example, in 2008, Dr. Nada Stotland, the president of the American Psychiatric Association acknowledged that CCHR “influences our legislatures, our Food and Drug Administration, our schools, and our media as a moving force behind the unwarranted ‘black box warnings’” on the potentially lethal effects of psychiatric drugs [emphasis added]. Note that in Dr. Stotland’s opinion, warning children, adolescents and young adults that could become suicidal while taking antidepressants—a fact the drug regulatory agencies the world over have determined is vital information—is “unwarranted.”

Only by providing all the facts about psychiatric treatment risks can we possibly reduce the number of victims who unfortunately learn this truth through personal tragedy.

One of the most important things to know about psychiatry is the complete lack of science supporting its system of diagnosis or its treatments. Take, for example, the psychiatric “billing bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV. Not one of the disorders has ever been proven to exist by using observable pathology or objective tests. A panel of psychiatrists arbitrarily defined symptoms of each mental disorder and then literally voted on their suitability for inclusion in the DSM. By this system, if a newly defined mental disorder loses the vote, it fails to make it into the DSM. The system is subjective and ambiguous; its terminology is ill-defined or undefined.

In spite of such serious and fundamental flaws, this system is widely accepted as the benchmark for both judging human behavior and for determining treatments in courts, prisons and schools. In many countries, the DSM forms the basis of mental health services billings to insurance companies and for screening children and others for “mental disorders” in order to hook them on psychotropic drugs.

By medicalizing everyday problems, psychiatry has fraudulently labeled millions as mentally ill, and either forced or convinced them to adopt prescription psychotropic drugs as a routine part of their lives. As a result, psychotropic drug consumption has escalated with 100 million people worldwide now taking these drugs, of which 20 million are children.

CCHR remains dedicated to exposing the scientific myths and hype with which psychiatry has managed to surround its diagnostic system and treatments. We work with many medical doctors and other professionals that see it as their duty to ensure government policy and regulations provide the strongest warnings about psychiatric treatments.

Our work aligns with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For example:

• Article 5: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,"

• Article 7: "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law," and

• Article 26: "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."

Psychiatrists violate these on a daily basis:

• Through psychiatrists' false diagnoses, stigmatizing labels, easy-seizure involuntary commitment laws, brutal, depersonalizing treatments, including deadening, mind-altering drugs, thousands needlessly fall into their coercive system every day all over the world. It is a system that exemplifies human rights abuse and denies individuals their inherent human rights.

• Thousands of psychiatric victims or their families contact CCHR each year to report incidents of psychiatric harm such as sexual abuse, brutal institutional treatment and conditions, hospital fraud, false imprisonment, patient deaths and even murder.

• Scores of parents are being denied the right to choose the kind of education their child should be given, being coerced into administering their child mind-altering psychiatric drugs as a requisite for school, or are being forced to subject them to mandatory "screening" for mental disorders for which no scientific evidence exists.

Through CCHR's work:

• Thousands of victims have been rescued from involuntary commitment and other coercive psychiatric practices.

• Hundreds of victims have been compensated tens of millions of dollars for the mental and physical damage they have suffered in psychiatric hands.

• Legislation has been enacted to ensure that psychiatric sexual abuse and rape of patients is dealt with as a criminal offense.

CCHR also works to make psychiatry and criminal psychiatrists answerable to the law:

• In one 10-year period, CCHR's investigations led to the prosecution and conviction of more than a thousand psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health workers.

• CCHR's monthly Fraud Report provides insurance investigators with information about convicted psychiatrists and psychologists.

• During the 1990s, CCHR documentation contributed to government investigations into a plague of private psychiatric hospital insurance fraud across the United States. Key psychiatrists involved were criminally charged and government and insurance companies recovered more than $1 billion. Similar investigations followed in Canada.

• Legislation now exists to protect parents from being forced to place their child on a psychiatric drug as a requisite for the child’s education and since 2003, the number of drug regulatory agency warnings against psychiatric drug risks now means parents and consumers are better informed about these risks. The FDA, for example, now insists that drug makers advertise that all consumers report adverse drug risks directly to the FDA—a campaign that CCHR continues so that consumers know this right and protect themselves in every country.

Mental health can be created, but only through:

• Effective mental healing delivered in a calm atmosphere characterized by tolerance, safety, security and respect for peoples rights;

• By restoring individuals to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being;

• Using highly trained, ethical practitioners who are committed primarily to their patients and patient familys well being.

This description bears no resemblance to mental treatment under psychiatry today. Psychiatry does not produce mental health, but rather mental ill health and millions of ruined lives.

At CCHR we work to help bring about an environment for mental healing that is based upon human dignity and decency. As a result of our work, millions have avoided the ravages of psychiatric treatment.

We welcome you to our website and hope that you will avail yourself of this opportunity to better guarantee the future for your loved ones, your friends and yourself.

Sincerely, Jan Eastgate President Citizens Commission on Human Rights International

Jan Eastgate has a more than 30-year history of investigating psychiatric abuses. Politicians, lawyers, psychologists and civil rights workers have described her as a tireless campaigner, and a person of enormous determination and courage who has performed remarkable work. In her native Australia, Ms. Eastgate helped achieve a Royal Commission (highest level of government inquiry) into deep sleep treatment, a lethal psychiatric practice involving a heavy drug cocktail and electroshock. The government banned this practice and compensated hundreds of patients. Based in Los Angeles at CCHR’s international headquarters for more than 15 years, Ms. Eastgate has conducted investigations into and inspections of psychiatric facilities and conditions in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, Russia and the United States.