In 2010 a 16-year-old African-American foster child died after being injected with two psychiatric drugs and restrained in SSM DePaul Health Center, a St. Louis company-owned psychiatric ward, and ruled a homicide. Less than two years earlier, a death at the same hospital in the Bridgeton suburb of St. Louis had led to a state inquiry that uncovered instances of improperly secluding and restraining patients and failing to report deaths to authorities.
Before she died, the foster child was held down and injected with Geodon (ziprasidone, a psychiatric antipsychotic drug) and Ativan (lorazepam, a psychiatric anti-anxiety drug).
It wasn’t until 2017 that a lawsuit was filed against the Children’s Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services for overdrugging foster children with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs, for which a settlement was reached in 2019.
Some of the behavioral hospital chains that have come under scrutiny for patient abuse include six facilities operating in Missouri.
And now today the abuse continues, with African-Americans over-represented in restraint-related deaths of children and adults with disabilities, accounting for 22% of the deaths studied while representing only 13% of the total U.S. population. African-Americans are dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of whites.
As a human rights organization, exposing racism and restraint abuse in the mental health system has been a pivotal campaign since the inception in 1969 of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). This also included exposing psychosurgery experiments on African-American prisoners and a 1994 booklet on psychiatry creating racism. CCHR has successfully worked with the NAACP since 2003, exposing the stigmatizing labeling and drugging of African-American children to obtain three national NAACP resolutions against the forced drugging and also electroshocking of children and teens.
CCHR’s co-founder, Dr. Thomas Szasz, a professor of psychiatry, exposed that while Dr. Benjamin Rush, the “Father of American Psychiatry” asserted he was anti-slavery in the late 1700s and signed the Declaration of Independence, he purchased a child slave that he later freed for compensation. He provided a medical model we still see the impact of today that was used to justify segregation and modern racism. Rush claimed that Blacks suffered from a “medical” disease called “negritude” derived from leprosy. Therefore, he asserted that freed Blacks should be segregated and prevented from inter-racial marriage so as to not spread the disease. Rush believed the “cure” was when their skin turned white.
A seal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that features Rush, a racist and slave owner, is still used for ceremonial purposes and internal documents. There’s also an annual award the APA gives in his name. How appallingly hypocritical, then, that within days of the recent racial protest marches starting, the APA issued a press statement, saying, it “will not stand for racism against Black Americans,” when history shows otherwise. APA urged anyone suffering from the recent trauma or civil unrest to, “seek psychiatric treatment.”
This comes from a group whose members invented the term “protest psychosis” in the 1960s to describe Blacks participating in the Civil Rights movement. Advertisements placed in psychiatric journals for powerful antipsychotic drugs used angry black men or African tribal symbols to influence the prescriptions of antipsychotics to African-Americans. Today, there is still an over-representation of antipsychotic use among African-Americans and harmful psychotropic drugs are prescribed to African-American children as young as 18 months.
African-American students also receive disproportionate discipline in schools. Representing about 15% of the total enrollment, African-American students accounted for 27% of restraints and 23% of seclusion in schools.
CCHR can access over 50 years of research that documents the horrible betrayal of African-American and other groups by a eugenics-based, racist psychiatric-psychological model that has caused immeasurable harm and suffering.
Click here for more information on how psychiatry creates racism.
