Report On Failed Mental Health Programs
A new resource on failed psychiatric treatment programs serves as advice to policymakers being asked to support and fund a resurgence of psychedelic drug therapies when in the sixties these caused harm and violence in the community.
The mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) has launched its online report and resource about failed mental health programs which are impacting psychiatric policy today. The release of Why Psychiatry Sees Itself as a Dying Industry—A Resource on Its Failures and Critics coincides with California legislators considering passing a law that will legalize possession of psychedelic hallucinogens and promote researching the mind-altering chemicals as treatment for “mental illness.”
A petition that CCHR’s Sacramento chapter posted online opposes this, joining many others concerned about resurrecting psychedelics that were a past failed psychiatric experiment. In California, LSD was also linked to the horrific Charles Manson murders in the 1960s.
It was the street use of and research into LSD in the 60s and 70s that led to Congress shutting down all LSD mind-control research in 1977.
CCHR says resurrecting LSD—a failed and dangerous therapy—to replace current failed treatments shows a fundamental disregard for human life because of the drugs’ mind-altering properties, also borne out by the psychiatric-intelligence community’s past research of LSD, psilocybin and amphetamines. As extensively researched in Tom O’Neill’s book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, LSD helped create the mindset of the Charles Manson Family who, after many months of use of the drug, gruesomely murdered nine-month pregnant actress, Sharon Tate and four others in California August 1969.
CCHR’s report highlights similar failed mental treatment programs using a hefty body of evidence showing the lack of science behind psychiatry’s diagnostic system that led to unworkable and potentially damaging treatments, which includes psychedelics. United Nations Special Rapporteur and psychiatrist Dainius P?ras, M.D., recently noted that with psychiatry’s reliance upon biomedical interventions, we shouldn’t be surprised that “global psychiatry is facing a crisis, which to a large extent is a moral crisis, or a crisis of values.”
In October 2020, the World Psychiatric Association issued a Position Statement about improving mental health care, because widespread coercion in psychiatry violates patients’ “rights to liberty; autonomy; freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment….”
CCHR says that when treatments fail and psychotropic drug patents run out, there are usually efforts to resurrect old treatments as “new miracles,” such as electroshock treatment and now psychedelics. The reason for the new market is there’s profit to be made. The psychedelic “therapy” industry is predicted to reach $7 billion by 2027.
CCHR, which was established in 1969, is responsible for over 190 laws that inform and protect consumers about mental health treatment risks. It suggests policymakers and appropriations committees apprise themselves of past psychedelic drug research risks, read CCHR’s report to prevent funding programs that have failed and involve dangerous practices, and base reforms on CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights.
