Physical Abuse, Massive Drugging and Medical Neglect Among Common Abuses

In the early morning of February 13, 2006, 14-year-old Sarah Crider, on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs, died alone at the Georgia Regional psychiatric hospital, lying in a pool of her own vomit. Her horrific and preventable death was exposed in an investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), described in a January 7^th article, which uncovered at least 115 suspicious patient deaths in Georgia's state psychiatric hospitals between 2002-2006, involving patients choking on food, lack of proper medical care, suicide, physical restraint and other unnatural causes. The AJC article reported that the findings—“employees beating patients with aluminum pipes to doctors widely prescribing sedatives just to maintain order—evoke images [of horrific psychiatric treatment] from the mid-20^th century….” According to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) a mental health watchdog, in just 4 decades, more Americans have died in psychiatric institutions than American soldiers killed in battle in all the wars since 1776—including World Wars I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf Wars and Iraq War.

A testament to the barbaric conditions still found in psychiatric facilities today, the AJC reported that at the end of her last visit to Sarah at the hospital, Sarah's grandmother “heard a loud, prolonged scream from behind the locked door to Sarah's unit. A hospital employee explained that a patient was being restrained.” According to Dr. Bernard Aarons, former director of the Center for Mental Health Services, restraint deaths by mental health staff could result in as much as 150 deaths a year.

Due to exposure of these needless and tragic abuses, federal regulations in the United States now prohibit the use of physical and chemical restraints to coerce or discipline psychiatric patients. However, with government-funded psychiatric institutions lacking independent oversight, deaths, rapes and abuses occurring in the facilities routinely go uninvestigated and unpunished. For more information on child deaths resulting from psychiatric "treatment," read The Silent Death of America's Children, a publication by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, or click here to learn more about violent and lethal restraints in psychiatric facilities.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights@cchr.org.