Despite $280 billion annually poured into psychiatric hospitals, forced treatment, and community programs, outcomes are abysmal. Governments must review costs and results before sinking more funds into failed systems.
By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
October 3, 2025
Key Facts
- Decades of closing state psychiatric hospitals, expanding private facilities, community centers, and mandating treatment—have all failed to improve outcomes, proving the system itself is broken.
- For-profit psychiatric chains now control nearly one-third of U.S. beds, with repeated scandals, lawsuits, and closures exposing systemic abuse.
- Mandated treatment through mental health courts and community “treatment” orders has proven costly, punitive, and ineffective—failing to reduce crime, recidivism, or improve mental health.
- Psychiatric drugs cause devastating iatrogenic harm, including permanent brain and nerve damage, while fueling a secondary $5 billion profit market for drugs to treat the side effects they create.
With $280 billion invested annually in psychiatric hospitals and treatment—and billions more paid out to treat the damage they cause—the mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International warns that continuing to fund the system without accountability is like pouring water into a sieve or patching a sinking ship with paper.
For-profit behavioral chains now control nearly one-third of all freestanding psychiatric beds in the U.S., up from less than one-quarter in 2011, while government-owned beds have fallen from 64% to 48%.[1] These corporate providers have been repeatedly exposed for abuse and neglect. Since 2015, over 120 youth treatment centers have closed after scandals, lawsuits, or safety violations. Acadia Healthcare alone has faced lawsuits and media exposés, including last year’s New York Times investigation, and the recent closure of its Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center in Illinois following a sexual assault case.[2]
Meanwhile, proponents of “bringing back” large state-run mental institutions ignore history. When state hospitals were shut down in the 1960s, it was not because psychiatry had reformed but because conditions were so appalling that they became a national scandal. Psychiatry’s promised “community mental health” solution merely shifted abuse from one setting to another, while psychiatrists expanded their reach and funding by prescribing more drugs to more people.
The numbers prove the futility: In fiscal year 2022, $36.5 billion in federal and state funding was allocated to community mental health systems. Medicaid was the largest single funding source for community mental health at almost $24.7 billion, followed by state government funds at $8.1 billion. In 2026, the federal government distributed $319 million specifically for community mental health services through its primary block grant program, part of nearly $800 million in total behavioral health block grant funding nationwide.[3] Yet outcomes have not improved.
- Between 1999 and 2019, psychotropic drugs were implicated in 51,446 deaths and nearly 650,000 overdoses, while the annual death rate from these drugs more than tripled.[4]
- Suicide rates have risen 30% since 2000.[5]
- Mental health courts and community treatment orders have reinforced failure. As of 2022, over 650 such courts have been established, but research shows they do not improve mental health, reduce reoffending, or save costs. Instead, they are often expensive, resource-intensive, and punitive—where if someone misses taking a mandated psychiatric drug, it can mean jail time.[6]
- Psychiatric drugs make suicide nearly six times more likely, while psychiatric hospitalization raises the risk of self-inflicted death an alarming 44 times.[7]
The Iatrogenic Drug Damage and Profits
Iatrogenic harm—injuries caused by medical treatment itself—is a hallmark of modern psychiatric drugging, driving up health care costs and fueling a cycle of permanent disability and profit.
Psychiatric drugs can cause profound neurological and nervous system damage, including injury to the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves. Adverse effects include seizures, paralysis, loss of coordination and muscle strength, numbness, loss of consciousness, and an increased risk of stroke. Even widely prescribed SSRI antidepressants can trigger serotonin syndrome, a potentially lethal reaction marked by muscle rigidity, high fever, seizures, irregular heartbeat, and organ failure. Disturbingly, many of these side effects mimic or worsen the very “mental disorders” the drugs are marketed to treat—drug-induced agitation or anxiety is frequently mislabeled as a “mood disorder,” resulting in yet more prescriptions, escalating risks and costs.[8]
Antipsychotics are particularly devastating. They cause tardive dyskinesia (TD)—permanent, involuntary muscle movements—in 20% to 50% of those prescribed them. They also produce akathisia, a state of unbearable inner restlessness that can drive violent behavior, along with insulin resistance, cardiac complications, and severe metabolic disturbances.[9]
Rather than halting prescriptions when such damage occurs, psychiatry has created an entire secondary industry to “treat” drug-induced conditions. For example, the same manufacturers that profit from selling antipsychotics also profit from selling drugs to suppress TD symptoms.[10] By 2024, the TD treatment market had reached $3.6 billion and is expected to climb to $5.2 billion within five years.[11]
“This demonstrates a grim business model: the continuation of prescribing psychotropic drugs known to cause permanent harm ensures a growing market for drugs to treat those harms,” says Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International.
Far from healing, this revolving door of iatrogenic injury and psychiatric-pharmaceutical profit ensures patients remain trapped in a cycle of dependency, disability, and escalating costs—all while psychiatric providers reap billions.
“This is not care—it is coercion weaponized under the false banner of help,” Eastgate states. “The biomedical model psychiatry clings to is not only ineffective—it is harmful and costly.”
Governments must stop treating the funding of psychiatry as unquestionable good. Before infusing more billions into state hospitals, private chains, or mandated treatment programs, there must be a hard audit of costs versus outcomes. To do otherwise is refilling a leaking bucket—it guarantees waste and perpetuates harm.
Instead of repeating failed approaches, policymakers must demand accountability, end coercive practices, and reject psychiatry’s biomedical model that has only deepened America’s crisis. Until then, every taxpayer dollar poured into this system is not just wasted—it fuels human suffering and ensures a further waste of funds and, most importantly, lives.
[1] Psychiatric Beds Increasingly Controlled by For-Profit Giants, Behavioral Health Business, 23 Sept. 2025, https://bhbusiness.com/2025/09/23/psychiatric-beds-increasingly-controlled-by-for-profit-giants/
[2] Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, “How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients,” The New York Times, 1 Sept. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/business/acadia-psychiatric-patients-trapped.html; Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, “Suicides and Rape at a Prized Mental Health Center,” The New York Times, 22 Apr. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/business/acadia-timberline-knolls-suicide-rape.html
[3] “Organization & Funding of Community Mental Health,” 2023-2024, NRI, Nov. 2024; SAMHSA, “SAMHSA Distributes Nearly $800 Million in Block Grants Nationwide,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 4 Feb. 2026, https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press-announcements/20260204/samhsa-distributes-nearly-800-million-block-grants-nationwide-community-based-mental-health-substance-abuse-programs
[4] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/11/22/280b-invested-mental-health-worsens-cchr-demands-audit-and-accountability/; Mike Vuolo, “Trends in Psychotropic-Drug-Implicated Mortality: Psychotropic Drugs as a Contributing But Non-Underlying Cause of Death,” Drug Alcohol Depend, 24, June 2021,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8355085/
[5] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/11/22/280b-invested-mental-health-worsens-cchr-demands-audit-and-accountability/; Jamie Ducharme, “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” TIME, 28 Aug. 2024, https://time.com/6308096/therapy-mental-health-worse-us/
[6] “Well-intentioned mental health courts can struggle to live up to their goals,” NPR, 27 Sept. 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/12/21/1219628362/well-intentioned-mental-health-courts-can-struggle-to-live-up-to-their-goals
[7] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/11/22/280b-invested-mental-health-worsens-cchr-demands-audit-and-accountability/, citing Matthew M. Large, Christopher J. Ryan, “Disturbing findings about the risk of suicide and psychiatric hospitals,” Soc. Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiology (2014), 49: 1353-1355, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-014-0912-2
[8] Adam O’Brien, Ph.D., “The Double-Edged Sword: Medication Potency, Side Effects, and the Mind,” Wounded Healers Institute, 24 July 2025
[9] https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/05/psychiatrists-argue-attention-iatrogenic-harms/; https://www.cchrint.org/2021/10/11/consumers-beware-of-antipsychotics-long-term-debilitating-effects/; Elyse M. Cornett, PhD, “Medication-Induced Tardive Dyskinesia: A Review and Update,” The Ochsner Journal, Summer 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472076/; “Akathisia: 15 Things to Know About This Horrible Condition,” MedPro, July 24, 2017, https://www.medprodisposal.com/akathisia-15-things-to-know-about-this-horrible-condition/
[10] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/10/11/consumers-beware-of-antipsychotics-long-term-debilitating-effects/; https://www.rxlist.com/ingrezza-side-effects-drug-center.htm#professional; https://www.drugs.com/sfx/ingrezza-side-effects.html
[11] https://market.us/report/global-tardive-dyskinesia-treatment-market/
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