Expanding psychiatry’s powers to forcibly detain and drug individuals under the guise of “restoring public order” mirrors eugenics policies—using vague labels and coercive “treatments” that often worsen individuals and violate human rights.
By Jan Eastgate
President CCHR International
September 12, 2025
Key Points:
- Mass Detention: Over 1.2 million Americans are involuntarily hospitalized every year—about two every minute.
- Coercive Practices: 82% of U.S. psychiatric facilities use seclusion, chemical restraints, or electroshock, condemned as torture under UN treaties.
- Eugenics Legacy: Buck v. Bell (1927) upheld compulsory sterilization of those labeled “unfit”—a ruling never overturned.
- Global Trend: Europe’s proposed Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention regarding human rights in biomedicine would entrench forced psychiatric treatment, despite international human rights law rejecting it.
The United States is sliding back into a dark chapter of history: eugenics cloaked as psychiatric “care.” New federal and state initiatives to expand involuntary psychiatric commitment and forced treatment mirror discredited practices once used to sterilize, segregate, and even eliminate people deemed “unfit.”
While much attention is focused on U.S. mental health crises—from homelessness to rising violence—CCHR cautions that the solutions being advanced echo the pseudoscience of eugenics, not medicine or human rights. And the abuse is global.
A recent U.S. federal initiative on homelessness and substance use urges states to funnel individuals into long-term psychiatric institutions. The order describes this as “the most proven way to restore public order.” But a 2022 Harvard School of Public Health study says psychiatric hospitals continue to abuse the incarcerated, using forced electroshock, chemical restraints, and prolonged mechanical restraint—practices violating the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT).[1]
Across America, 1.2 million people are involuntarily hospitalized annually—about two every minute[2]; 82% of child and adolescent residential psychiatric facilities use seclusion and restraint.[3] Courts rely on vague standards like “danger to self or others” or “unsound mind”[4]—terms with no scientific definition. Once detained, individuals may face:
- Forced drugging with powerful antipsychotics.
- Electroshock therapy (ECT) against their wishes.
- Physical and chemical restraints that international treaties recognize as potential torture.
A Eugenics Legacy That Never Ended
Far from a new policy, today’s involuntary commitment system directly descends from the eugenics movement, legitimized views of “inferiority” by lending them pseudo-scientific support.
- Buck v. Bell (1927): The U.S. Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilization of those labeled “feebleminded.” This ruling has never been overturned and was cited as recently as 2001.[5]
- Psychiatric categories: Official diagnostic terms like “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” justified segregation and sterilization.[6] In the early 1900s, eugenics “defects” were what U.S. psychiatrists later defined as attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.[7] Psychiatrists championed the idea that “imbeciles” and people with mental challenges were an undue hardship on society, leading to the murder of “undesirables” in Nazi Germany. Today, there are the unproven and, therefore, fraudulent assertions that “mental illness” is hereditary.
- Lobotomies & shock treatments: From the 1930s onward, invasive and violent “treatments” were performed on tens of thousands in U.S. hospitals.[8]
Eugenics framed institutionalization as “humane” while serving social order. Today’s rhetoric of restoring “public safety” by removing the homeless, drug users, or the mentally ill into psychiatric custody is indistinguishable from that of the past.
International Context: Europe Repeats the Same Mistake
Europe is now debating an Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention, 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.Supporters claim it will “protect” the rights of people with mental disorders. In reality, it entrenches involuntary commitment and forced treatment—the very practices international human rights law rejects.[9] An estimated 38% of those involuntarily admitted to institutions in Europe face coercive measures—forced drugging, seclusion, or restraints—within four weeks.[10] Such practices have caused trauma, lasting injury, and even death.[11]
For U.S. readers unfamiliar with the structures:
- Council of Europe (46 member countries): Oversees human rights treaties.[12]
- Oviedo Convention (1997): First binding treaty on human rights in biomedicine.[13]
- Additional Protocol: Policy addition to theOviedo Convention that would explicitly allow detention and treatment without consent.
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which is binding international law, takes the opposite position:
- No one can be deprived of liberty because of a disability, including psychosocial disability.
- Involuntary psychiatric treatment violates Articles 14 (liberty) and 15 (freedom from torture).[14]
The U.S. is a signatory to the CRPD but has its own disabilities rights legislation. The UN CRPD Committee, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and disability rights groups across Europe have condemned the Protocol as a step backward into eugenics-era thinking.[15]
Forced Psychiatry by the Numbers
- Globally: 8.4 million people are admitted to mental hospitals each year; many against their will.[16]
- France: 75,000 people forcibly admitted annually; 28,000 subjected to seclusion or restraints.
- Switzerland: One in four psychiatric detainees is held against their will; 100 restraints are imposed daily.[17]
- England: Involuntary commitments rose 43% between 2006 and 2017.[18]
Such practices cause trauma, injury, and even death. WHO has documented systemic human rights violations across psychiatric institutions.[19]
Why This Matters for America Now
The U.S. is at a crossroads:
- Homelessness policies increasingly and falsely equate psychiatric detention with compassion—in essence, a betrayal of help.
- Drug use crises are being used to justify forced institutionalization and forced into unworkable treatment.
- Judicial authority is being expanded to allow indefinite confinement based on unproven psychiatric diagnoses.
But psychiatry itself admits it cannot cure any mental disorder. Under such conditions, involuntary commitment is not medicine—it is arbitrary detention under a medical pretext.
A Call to Action
CCHR urges U.S. legislators, legal professionals, and human rights advocates to:
- Reject expansion of involuntary commitment laws at state and federal levels.
- Investigate existing abuses in psychiatric hospitals, including forced drugging.
- Ban Electroshock Treatment.
- Support international human rights standards that prohibit detention based on disability.
- Demand withdrawal of the Council of Europe’s Additional Protocol
Conclusion
Involuntary psychiatric commitment today is not a form of care—it is the continuation of eugenics under new terminology. From Buck v. Bell in the U.S. to the Oviedo Protocol in Europe, the same rationale persists: protecting “public order” by empowering psychiatrists to strip individuals of their liberty and dignity.
America and Europe have a chance to reject this failed model and instead lead in advancing non-coercive, rights-based approaches to mental health. Expanded psychiatric commitment powers—whether in the U.S. or Europe—must end.
[1]https://www.cchrint.org/2025/08/15/cchr-addresses-un-in-support-of-global-ban-on-coercive-psychiatry/; Matthew S. Smith & Michael Ashley Stein, “When Does Mental Health Coercion Constitute Torture?: Implications of Unpublished U.S. Immigration Judge Decisions Denying Non-Refoulement Protection,” Fordham International Law Journal, Vol 45:5, 2022, https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ilj/vol45/iss5/2/, pp. 785-786
[2] Natalia Emanuel, et al., “A Danger to Self and Others: Health and Criminal Consequences of Involuntary Hospitalization,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, staff reports, July 2025, https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr1158.pdf?sc_lang=en
[3] Sharon Green-Hennessy, Kevin D Hennessy, “Predictors of Seclusion or Restraint Use Within Residential Treatment Centers for Children and Adolescents,” Psychiatric Quarterly, Dec. 2015, Vol. 86, Issue 4, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25733324/
[4] Recommendation 2091 (2016), “The case against a Council of Europe legal instrument on involuntary measures in psychiatry,” https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-EN.asp?fileid=22757
[5] Laura I Appleman, “Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability: The Forgotten History of Eugenics and Mass Incarceration,” Duke Law Journal, Dec. 2018, pp. 460–461
[6] https://thelawdictionary.org/unsound-mind/
[7] https://www.cchr.org/documentaries/age-of-fear/creating-the-holocaust.html
[8] Laura I Appleman, “Deviancy, Dependency, and Disability: The Forgotten History of Eugenics and Mass Incarceration,” Duke Law Journal, Dec. 2018, p. 450
[9] https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-and-biomedicine/protection-with-regard-to-involuntary-measures; Gérard Niveau, et al., “Psychiatric Commitment: Sixty Years Under the Scrutiny of the European Court of Human Rights,” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4 May 2021, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34017274/
[10] S P Sashidharan, Roberto Mezzina, Dainius Puras, “Reducing coercion in mental healthcare,” Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci, 9 July 2019, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7032511/
[11] David O’Donovan, “Current trends in restrictive interventions in psychiatry: a European perspective,” Cambridge University Press, 22 June 2022, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-advances/article/current-trends-in-restrictive-interventions-in-psychiatry-a-european-perspective/287C3187376FA5C987106BE108603819
[12] https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/the-council-of-europe-at-a-glance
[13] https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-and-biomedicine/oviedo-convention
[14] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-persons-disabilities
[15] Torsten Hjelmar, “Eugenics influenced the formulation of the European Convention on Human Rights,” The European Times, 27 May 2023, https://europeantimes.news/2023/05/eugenics-influenced-the-formulation-of-the-european-convention-on-human-rights/
[16] https://unitedgmh.org/newsroom/new-report-reveals-8-million-admitted-to-mental-hospitals-annually/
[17] National Association for the Development of Quality in Hospitals and Clinics; Swiss Health Observatory – 20-11-2023
[18] Op. cit.., “Reducing coercion in mental healthcare,” Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci, 9 July 2019,
[19] Ibid., “Reducing coercion in mental healthcare.”
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