Global health and human rights agencies—including the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO)—report that coercion and human rights abuses remain entrenched in mental health systems worldwide. Both have called for the abolition of such practices.
Coercive psychiatric practices include involuntary hospitalization, forced drugging, electroshock, seclusion, and physical, chemical, and mechanical restraints. The WHO warns that coercion “can inflict severe pain and suffering…with long-lasting physical and mental health consequences,” leading to “substantial trauma and even death,” and that these practices “violate the right to be protected from torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
Urgent Changes and Abolition Measures Needed:
- Abolish all coercive practices, including involuntary hospitalization and forced treatment.
- Eliminate financial incentives that support institutionalization and coercion.
- Ban forced drugging and community treatment orders, which violate fundamental rights.
- Replace forced interventions like drugging, electroshock, and psychosurgery with fully informed consent-based approaches, guaranteeing the right to refuse treatment.
- Reject the biomedical model approach to mental health.
- Shift from pharmaceutical and neurobiological dominance toward rights-based models of care.
- Mandate legislation that prohibits all involuntary measures and requires non-coercive responses in all mental health services.
- Respect advance directives (Psychiatric Living Wills), ensuring people can refuse psychiatric interventions during a crisis.
- Ensure accountability by enforcing penalties for violations,
- Guarantee access to justice, including the right to file complaints, challenge abuses, enforce rights, and prosecute or penalize those responsible for abuse and coercion, along with providing civil, administrative, or criminal sanctions and compensation.
“All persons should be able to exercise their right to give free and informed consent to accept or reject treatment in mental health systems. Denial of legal capacity, coercive practices, and institutionalization must end.” – World Health Organization
Ultimately, all forced treatment, especially electroshock, psychosurgery and other damaging brain-intervention treatments must be banned.
Read CCHR’s letter to the APA calling for them to commit to ending coercive psychiatry.
How You Can Help
To find out more about this campaign to end psychiatric coercion:
- Read CCHR’s MEMORANDUM on Human Rights in Mental Health Laws Needed to End Coercive Psychiatric Practices
- Raise Awareness: Use the Resolution against Coercive Psychiatric Practices that anyone can download, sign, and send to their legislative representative asking them to support human rights-based approaches in the field of mental health.
- Start a Petition to Ban Electroshock Treatment (ECT): A sample is provided here. For example, if you find electroshock being administered in a psychiatric facility, get a local petition signed opposing it. It could be directed to state health authorities and copied to the local council.
- Use CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights as a guide for needed protections globally.
- Psychiatric Living Will (Advance Directive): Sign and distribute this sample advance directive to protect against forced and unwanted psychiatric interventions and treatments.
Read more about coercive psychiatric practices from the World Health Organization and the United Nations:
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