SAVING INDIA’S FUTURE BY OUTLAWING ABUSIVE PSYCHIATRIC PRACTICES
Growing up with a passion for helping others, Dr. Khazi Muzaffar ul Islam is today an emergency medical doctor in India who discovered Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) online in 2009. In regularly dealing with severe cases, he observed, “If you start taking drugs from a psychiatrist you are in for lifelong pain; if you take real medicine you feel better. Psych drugs just make your brain go to sleep.”
Another cause of “lifelong pain” is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Dr. Khazi had seen street children labeled, then electroshocked, wiping them clean, only to then—as he puts it—“brainwash” them into doing illegal activities.
Drawing upon CCHR’s materials, he first delivered a seminar for Bapuji College of Nursing students in Karnataka state. He distributed CCHR ECT fliers, demanding a ban on it and showed the CCHR documentary, Making a Killing. He continued to deliver more seminars.
When a CCHR International delegation visited India in 2011, they turned the tide for lasting change. Joining Dr. Khazi, they conducted seminars and inspected the Yerwada Regional Mental Hospital, one of the largest in Asia. There they documented horrific conditions: patients being held like criminals behind rusty bars, others tied to rickety beds and still others naked on a thin mattress on the floor.
The house of cards had begun to tremble. In 2011, the government announced a planned revision to the 1987 Mental Health Act. In 2013, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture issued a report naming “electroshock resulting in seizures” as “abuse” in “the guise of rehabilitation.” Human Rights Watch followed, inspecting 24 Indian mental hospitals and interviewing over 200 female mental health victims. In 2014, they issued their report, “Treated Worse than Animals,” which detailed torture, involuntary commitment and ECT. One incident cited a woman institutionalized by her husband without her consent and given ECT numerous times under anesthesia without her knowledge. Her husband wanted her labeled insane so he could divorce her without having to pay alimony.
Finally, the house of cards collapsed for good, when a revised Mental Healthcare Act was signed into law in 2017. It prohibits ECT on minors and further bans the chaining, seclusion and solitary confinement of mentally ill patients, while providing individuals the basic right to decline psychiatric treatment altogether.
TAKING ACTION
Protect Against Psychiatric Abuse
CCHR’s mission is to eradicate abuses committed in the guise of mental health and to enact patient and consumer protections for all.
CCHR receives reports from individuals who have been abused after they sought help from psychiatrists and/or psychologists and were falsely diagnosed and forced to undergo unwanted and harmful psychiatric treatment. Such treatments include electroconvulsive shock “therapy,” involuntary commitment and psychiatric drugs which are documented as causing serious side effects. CCHR is often able to assist people with filing complaints or work with their attorneys to further investigate their case.
Anyone whose mother, wife, sister or father, brother, son, child or friend has been killed or damaged by psychiatric “treatment” should write up the full specifics and provide any documentary evidence. Report this today at www.cchr.org/abuse. All information received is kept in strict confidence.
Help us stop the abuse.
END PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE
As a nonprofit mental health watchdog, CCHR relies on memberships and donations to carry out its mission to eradicate psychiatric violations of human rights and clean up the field of mental health. To become part of the world’s largest movement for mental health change, join the group that has helped enact more than 180 laws protecting citizens from abusive psychiatric practices.
1. Любые решения относительно приёма (изменения количества или отказа от психотропных препаратов) следует принимать только на основании консультации со своим врачом и только под его контролем. Ничто на данном сайте не является советом или призывом к самостоятельным действиям по этому поводу.
