CCHR leads protest against American Psychiatric Association, citing billions of dollars wasted on coercive practices—deadly restraints killing children, forced treatment—and a system that harms without accountability.
By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
May 17, 2025
Key Facts:
- CCHR leads international protest outside the APA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, exposing deadly restraint practices, forced treatment, and psychiatric abuse hidden behind a $329 billion taxpayer-funded system.
- Children are dying—restrained, drugged, and silenced—under psychiatric care, yet the APA refuses to commit to ending coercive practices condemned by the United Nations and World Health Organization.
- Despite record federal mental health spending, America faces worsening outcomes: rising suicides, drugging of 6.1 million children, and rampant institutional abuse with impunity.
- Black youth and foster children are disproportionately targeted with dangerous psychiatric labels, drugs, and restraints—what civil rights leaders are calling “chemical racism.”
- CCHR and its global allies are demanding immediate accountability and legislative action to ban coercive psychiatric practices—declaring, “This is not care. These are crimes.”
LOS ANGELES, Calif. – As the American Psychiatric Association (APA) convened for its 2025 Annual Meeting, it was met by a diverse coalition of human rights advocates, civil rights leaders, doctors, and attorneys who demanded urgent action to end forced psychiatric practices—particularly deadly restraints—after multiple children’s final words were “I can’t breathe.” Led by CCHR International, the protestors at the Los Angeles Convention Center exposed the epidemic of child restraint deaths in U.S. psychiatric institutions. Among the victims: Ja’Ceon Terry, 7, and Cornelius Frederick, 16, both African American foster children.[1] Most recently, Clark Harman, 12, died after being restrained in a North Carolina behavioral therapy camp. In all cases, medical examiners ruled their deaths homicides. Yet, in only one case was there limited criminal accountability.[2]
“These are preventable deaths. These are crimes,” said Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International. “The APA’s failure to put an end to violent restraints, drugging, and electroshock constitutes complicity in torture and child abuse.”
Global Bodies Demand an End—Why Won’t the APA?
The United Nations, World Health Organization (WHO), and World Psychiatric Association have all formally called for an end to coercive psychiatric practices. The WHO reaffirmed in 2025 its position against these—forced drugging, electroshock, and physical restraints—citing violations of human rights and dignity. Yet, the APA has not committed to a no-coercion policy.
Systemic Harm and Harrowing Statistics
- Over 37% of child and youth psychiatric inpatients have been restrained or secluded—often for non-threatening behavior.[3]
- A Cornell University study found restraints are often triggered by “relatively benign behaviors.”[4]
- 17 deaths occurred in 21 California for-profit psychiatric hospitals over six years, with 300 serious violations including assaults and dangerous restraints.[5]
- 100 preventable deaths—including suicides and homicides—were reported over a decade in California psychiatric hospitals, per the Los Angeles Times.[6]
- Major chains Acadia Healthcare and Universal Health Services (UHS) have faced federal investigations and at least $580 million in jury verdicts over two children aged 8 and 13 sexually abused in their facilities.[7]
- Electroshock use rose 39% in California between 2021–2023[8] despite a state Supreme Court ruling that electroshock device manufacturers must warn about brain damage risks.[9]
- This year, the APA has permitted ECT manufacturers MECTA and SOMATICS and hospital chains Acadia and UHS to exhibit at its convention.
A $329 Billion Mental Health Failure
CCHR criticized the $329 billion in federal funding psychiatry received in 2022, a 315% increase since 2000, while the U.S. population only grew 18%.[10] There has been no corresponding improvement in mental health outcomes.
- The U.S. remains one of the saddest nations globally, with record-high suicides and mental health-related deaths.[11]
- Over 76 million Americans, including 6.1 million children, are prescribed psychotropic drugs, which can cause suicide, emotional numbing, sexual dysfunction, serious withdrawal effects, homicide, and death.[12]
- A 2023 UK study linked antidepressants to 2,718 hangings, 933 overdoses, and 979 suicides.[13] Similar patterns are expected in the U.S.
“This is not healthcare—it’s a $329 billion failure built on legalized assault,” Eastgate said. “Restrained children have died crying ‘I can’t breathe.’ Psychiatry must be held accountable.”
Racism in Psychiatry: A System Without Justice
Rev. Frederick Shaw, Jr., NAACP Inglewood-South Bay President, condemned the disproportionate use of restraints and heavy drugging on Black Americans:
- Black patients are prescribed higher doses of antipsychotics, which double the risk of Tardive Dyskinesia (TD)—a permanent, disfiguring movement disorder.[14]
- Over 27% of Black youth in the U.S. are diagnosed with “oppositional defiant disorder”—a label without any biological test to support it.[15]
- Shaw compared this to the 1960s when civil rights activists were labeled with “protest psychosis” and drugged with antipsychotics. “This is chemical racism,” Rev. Shaw stated. “It’s a modern extension of the same psychiatric abuses used to silence Black voices in the civil rights era.”
- African Americans made up 22% of restraint-related deaths in a variety of healthcare settings, including residential psychiatric hospitals, wilderness therapy camps and state institutions.[16] Shaw adds: “Each death is a damning indictment of a mental health system that tolerates homicide in the name of treatment.”
Chemical Warfare on Veterans?
Joseph J. Cecala, Jr., civil rights attorney and former U.S. Army Captain, warned of widespread psychiatric drugging in the military:
- Antidepressants—linked to suicide—make up two-thirds of the U.S. Department of Veteran Administration psychiatric drug spending.[17]
- Veterans account for nearly 13% of adult suicides in the U.S.—over 6,000 lives lost every year.[18]
- A Department of Defense-funded study raised concerns about enemy nations monitoring psychiatric prescribing trends in America for potential exploitation.[19] “If these drugs are considered a national security risk in enemy hands, why are we prescribing them to our own troops, children, and citizens?,” asked Cecala.
Prior to the protest, at a formal opening of CCHR’s Traveling Exhibit, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, being held to coincide with the APA convention, CCHR presented Human Rights Awards to:
- Amalia Gamio, an advocate for disability rights from Mexico and a vice chair, UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which urges bans on forced psychiatric practices, specifically “forced hospitalization and forced treatment.”[20] She stated, “There is an urgent need to ban all coercive and non-consensual measures in psychiatric settings.”
- Dr. David Schneider-Addae-Mensah, a German attorney who won a landmark case ruling that involuntary psychiatric treatment on certain patients is a criminal assault under Germany’s Constitution. He stated, “Psychiatric drugs can induce suicidal thoughts. If someone takes their life while under the influence of such a drug, that act is no longer self-determined. Courts should recognize this for what it is: attempted murder by remote perpetration. Responsibility lies with the prescriber. Let us keep fighting to ensure psychiatry no longer operates above the law and is held accountable, and prosecute them accordingly.”
A Call to Action: The Coalition Demands the APA:
- Ban all coercive psychiatric practices: forced institutionalization, drugging, restraints, seclusion, electroshock and other brain-intervention, damaging practices.
Eastgate concluded. “The APA must end its silence and take a public stand. Anything less perpetuates a legacy of criminal harm disguised as care.”
Get Involved: Ban Coercive Psychiatry
CCHR launched a new “Ban Coercive Psychiatric Practices and Abuse” section on its website, cchrint.org, providing tools to act, including:
- Memorandum of facts
- Legislative resolution template
- Electroshock ban petition
- Psychiatric living will to prevent coercive treatment
- Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights
Global Frontlines Against Psychiatric Abuse
As the APA gathered, it promoted a global narrative of progress and innovation in mental health—with panels on psychiatry in Europe, Japan, Australia, Spain and more. But behind this curated image lies a deeply entrenched system of coercion and harm and global scandal of abuse with impunity. Representatives of CCHR’s global network were among those marching outside the APA convention, exposing the coercive practices the APA continues to defend: forced institutionalization, drugging, electroshock, and the silencing of dissent.
From securing legal victories in Europe to winning legislative protections for children in the United States, the abuses exposed by CCHR chapters show psychiatry’s violations of fundamental and Constitutional rights.
The following country reports reflect just a fraction of the courageous actions taken by CCHR chapters around the world to hold psychiatry accountable, secure legislative reforms, and ensure justice for victims.
Spain-Europe
On July 12, 2024, CCHR successfully defended its right to expose psychiatric abuse in Spain and on its international website, defeating an attempt by the Spanish Society of Psychiatry (SEP) to suppress its freedom of expression. The court ruled that CCHR’s materials address matters of “undoubted general interest” and contribute meaningfully to public debate on psychiatry, especially practices such as involuntary institutionalization, psychotropic drugging of children, and electroconvulsive therapy. Citing United Nations reports, the court affirmed that silencing such discussion would be an unjustified and excessive restriction on free speech. CCHR Europe has long advocated for international action to end coercive psychiatric practices, submitting materials to UN agencies and the WHO.
Japan: The APA’s symposium on “Lifestyle and Positive Mental Health – Comparison Between the U.S. and Japan,” featuring incoming APA president Theresa Miskimen Rivera, dangerously overlooks Japan’s deeply abusive psychiatric system. CCHR Japan has documented widespread criminal practices, including sexual assault of patients. In an unprecedented move, the Japanese Health Minister revoked 89 psychiatrists’ licenses for fraudulent credentials, and nearly half of all psychiatric patients over a four-decade period were involuntarily committed—about 1,800 dying each month.
In a chilling case this year, psychiatrist Osamu Tamur received a suspended prison sentence for helping cover up his daughter desecrating a head she had decapitated—an act tied to systemic abuse at Michinoku Memorial Hospital, where Tamur treated psychiatric patients. The killer, a patient, frequently tied to his bed with a rope, said he murdered to escape the torment of restraint: “I thought that if I killed someone, I could leave the hospital.” He was jailed for 17 years. The hospital director, Takashi Ishiyama and his bother Osamu then committed a cover-up, falsifying the death certificate to claim pneumonia as the cause. A hospital whistleblower exposed this, prompting a police investigation that revealed roughly 70% of 200 death certificates listed pneumonia.
CCHR has also exposed psychiatrists convicted of sexually abusing patients, including one sentenced in February to four years in prison for sexually assaulting a female patient.
Meanwhile, a U.S. CCHR “Psych Watch” newsletter being distributed to APA attendees lists 10 American psychiatrists convicted and jailed for a combined 156 years for crimes ranging from fraud and patient sexual assault, including of minors, to attempted murder and stabbing a patient with a sword.
Mexico:
Despite widespread psychiatric abuse and forced treatment, major reforms have been achieved. In 2022, Mexico amended its General Health Law to require voluntary mental health services and bans seclusion, restraints, and any cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices. CCHR Mexico also secured a national ban on coercive psychotropic drugging in schools, modeled on U.S. federal law CCHR obtained. Mexico’s federal House Committee on Science and Technology formally commended CCHR’s historic, “unprecedented fight” against psychiatric abuse and its protection of children.
New Zealand:
CCHR New Zealand, led by its executive director, Mike Ferris, and survivors of the now-closed Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital, were honored this year with the prestigious New Zealand Community of the Year Award for their decades-long fight for justice and reform. International attention mounted last year when an official government report confirmed that the electroshock without anesthesia that brutalized children at Lake Alice, including shocking children’s genitals, amounted to torture. The New York Times summarized the findings: “The abuse included sexual assault, electric shocks, chemical restraints, medical experimentation, sterilization, starvation, and beatings.” In a legal milestone, New Zealand Solicitor-General Una Jagose ruled that the “treatment” met the legal definition of torture under international law.
Hungary:
Klara Hidvegi, the legal director of CCHR Hungary, has relentlessly advocated for patients’ rights, seeking Constitutional protections. CCHR’s work led to a landmark legislative reform ensuring compensation for individuals unlawfully detained in psychiatric institutions. CCHR supported a patient, “SB,” who challenged his 2016 involuntary commitment as unlawful. With CCHR’s help, his appeal succeeded in 2018, and a compensation claim was pursued—eventually reaching the Constitutional Court in 2022. In a decisive ruling, the Court found that Parliament had failed to provide legal avenues for compensation in cases of unlawful psychiatric detention. After CCHR pressed the issue further with both the Court and the President of the Republic, the Ministry of Justice submitted a legal amendment. Enacted on December 20, 2024, the new regulation guarantees, for the first time, that victims of coercive and unlawful psychiatric commitment have a legal right to compensation.
Germany:
CCHR Germany leaders Nicola Kramer and Bernd Trepping spent years exposing psychiatry’s role in Holocaust atrocities. In 2010, Prof. Frank Schneider, then-president of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology, admitted that psychiatrists not only conceived of the Nazi euthanasia program but also selected victims and carried out the killings. On January 31, 2023, a historic mock trial was held at the United Nations in New York, prosecuting Nazi psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin—the architect of Hitler’s racial hygiene policy and the forced sterilization of 400,000 people, over 6,000 of whom died. Despite his crimes, Rüdin was never prosecuted and died in 1952. Presiding over the trial were Judge Elyakim Rubinstein (former Vice President, Israeli Supreme Court), Judge Angelika Nussberger (European Court of Human Rights), and Judge Silvia Fernández (former President, International Criminal Court). They found Rüdin guilty of incitement to crimes against humanity—murder, torture, extermination, and persecution.
Italy:
In 1938, Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti developed electroshock treatment after observing pigs being electrically stunned before slaughter in a Rome abattoir. Today, electroshock is still used in approximately 90 psychiatric facilities across Italy. Meanwhile, psychiatric drug use has sharply increased over the past decade.[21]
CCHR Italy, along with officials and members of the Italian Parliament, exposed concentration camp–like conditions in psychiatric asylums— where patients were confined naked in locked, crumbling rooms and treated worse than animals. After persistent efforts, CCHR secured a government resolution to shut down these institutions. The group also helped obtain legislation in Piemonte and the Province of Trento limiting psychiatric screening in schools and restricting the drugging of children.[22] Children’s rights advocate Vincenza Palmieri has worked to protect families from psychiatric abuse and authored a best-selling book revealing how psychiatric labeling has fueled a system of forced child-family separation in Italy.
Australia:
CCHR’s exposure of the lethal “Deep Sleep Therapy” in Australia led to its eventual ban after 48 patient deaths. The practice, used at Chelmsford Private Psychiatric Hospital, involved inducing a coma with psychotropic drugs while administering daily electroshock—often without consent. The late Dr. Harry Bailey, chief psychiatrist and proponent of the method, had studied it in the U.S. and Canada, where it was part of CIA-funded mind control experiments in the 1950s and ’60s. A New South Wales government inquiry, led by Justice John Slattery, determined that the electroshock given without consent constituted “a trespass to the person” and amounted to assault. In October 2023, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights formally called for a global ban on Deep Sleep Therapy in their joint guidance on mental health, human rights, and legislation.
U.S.A.:
In a landmark move, the Texas Governor signed legislation banning electroshock treatment on children under 16, with members of CCHR Texas—who had championed the bill—present at the signing. The law, now the most restrictive in the U.S., also requires psychiatrists to provide written warnings about the risk of death and permanent memory loss from ECT and to report autopsies for any patient who dies within 14 days of the procedure. This builds on a 1976 CCHR-led reform in California, which was the first U.S. law to require informed consent for ECT and psychosurgery and banned their use on children under 12—setting a precedent adopted across multiple states and countries.
[1] https://www.cchrint.org/2025/05/02/psychiatrys-legacy-of-racism-and-coercion-highlighted-in-restraint-deaths/ citing In Memoriam – BREAKING CODE SILENCE, https://www.breakingcodesilence.org/about-us/in-memoriam/; Tyler Kingkade, “Video shows fatal restraint of Cornelius Frederick, 16, in Michigan foster facility,” NBC News, July 20, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-fatal-restraint-cornelius-fredericks-16-michigan-foster-facility-n1233122; https://www.cchrint.org/2022/09/30/mental-illness-awareness-week-another-restraint-another-death/, citing Deborah Yetter, “7-year-old died at Kentucky youth treatment center due to suffocation, autopsy finds; 2 workers fired,” Louisville Courier Journal, 19 Sept. 2022, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/19/death-child-jaceon-terry-brooklawn-kentucky-youth-center/10428004002/
[2] Stephanie Moore, “No involuntary manslaughter after boy’s death at North Carolina camp,” NBC WYFF News, 6 Nov. 2024, https://www.wyff4.com/article/trails-carolina-camp-boy-death-no-charges/62828311
[3] Mohr, W, “Adverse Effects Associated With Physical Restraint,” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry—Review Paper, June 2003, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674370304800509
[4] https://www.ctinsider.com/projects/2022/child-deaths-school-restraint-seclusion/
[5] Cynthia Dizikes and Joaquin Palomino, “California is embracing psychiatric hospitals again. Behind locked doors, a profit-driven system is destroying lives,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Mar. 2025, https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/california-psychiatric-hospitals-crisis/
[6] Soumya Karlamangla, “Their kids died on the psych ward. They were far from alone, a Times investigation found,” Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 2019, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-01/psychiatric-hospital-deaths-california
[7] https://simonlawpc.com/results/illinois-jury-awards-535m-sexual-assault-at-uhs-psychiatric-facility/; “Judge reduces verdict by $355M in UHS subsidiary’s negligence case,” Becker’s Behavioral Health, 14 Oct. 2024, https://www.beckersbehavioralhealth.com/behavioral-health-news/judge-reduces-verdict-by-355m-in-uhs-subsidiarys-negligence-case.html; https://www.cchrint.org/2025/04/25/new-mental-health-guidelines-challenge-american-psychiatry-to-stop-coercion/, citing: Colleen Heild and Olivier Uytterbrouck, “Foster child sexual assault results in $485 million jury award,” Albuquerque Journal, 11 July 2023, https://www.abqjournal.com/news/foster-child-sexual-assault-results-in-485-million-jury-award/article_bfdf6e86-1f70-11ee-b4e3-c7c608def4fe.html
[8] Data obtained through Freedom of Information Act Request by CCHR International in 2024 from the California Department of Health Care Services
[9] Himes v. Somatics, LLC, https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2024/s273887.html
[10] U.S Behavioral Health Spending: A 2023 OPEN MINDS Market Intelligence Report, May 2023
[11] Laws, J, “US Plummets To Lowest-Ever Rank In World Happiness Report,” Newsweek, 20 March 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/us-plummets-lowest-ever-rank-world-happiness-report-2047776; https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/29/health/suicide-record-high-2022-cdc; https://www.healthymindspolicy.org/news/covid-report-release
[12] https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/people-taking-psychiatric-drugs/
[13] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/03/01/overdosing-americas-youth-dangerous-trend-in-antidepressant-prescribing/; John Read, Ph.D., “Antidepressants and Suicide: 7,829 Inquests in England and Wales, 2003–2020,” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 2023, Vol. 25, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1891/EHPP-2022-0015, https://connect.springerpub.com/content/sgrehpp/25/1/8
[14] https://www.cchrint.org/2025/05/02/psychiatrys-legacy-of-racism-and-coercion-highlighted-in-restraint-deaths/, citing: “Best Practices: Racial and Ethnic Effects on Antipsychotic Prescribing Practices in a Community Mental Health Center,” Psychiatric Services, 1 Feb. 2003,
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.54.2.177
[15] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2020-mental-health-client-level-data-annual-report
[16] “National Review of Restraint Related Deaths of Children and Adults with Disabilities: The Lethal Consequences of Restraint,” Equip for Equality, 2011, https://www.equipforequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/National-Review-of-Restraint-Related-Deaths-of-Adults-and-Children-with-Disabilities-The-Lethal-Consequences-of-Restraint.pdf
[17] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/11/08/veterans-day-cchr-calls-for-safeguards/
[18] https://news.va.gov/137221/va-2024-suicide-prevention-annual-report/; https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
[19] https://www.cchrint.org/2013/01/23/cchr-exposes-psychiatrys-military-spending-to-create-drugged-out-super-soldiers-by-kelly-omeara/
[20] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/06/11/world-health-organization-new-guidelines-are-vital-to-end-coercive-psychiatric-practices-abuse/, citing: “Guidance on Community Mental Health Services: Promoting Person-Centered and Rights-Based Approaches,” World Health Organization, 10 June 2021, p. 4, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240025707
[21] https://www.cchrint.org/2017/04/07/march-exhibition-florence-expose-psych-drug-use-in-italy-europe/
[22] https://www.cchrint.org/cchr-global-activities/cchr-italy/
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