Mission Statement: The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a non-profit, non-political, non-religious organisation whose mission is to eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health.

CCHR conducts educational actions to ensure that the public are informed about the potential side effects of psychiatric treatment so they are able to provide fully informed consent for any proposed psychiatric treatment for their family or themselves. Educational actions include providing free all of CCHR’s documentaries on DVDs to Australians along with free publications and a free to attend touring exhibition. CCHR offers a free public service to those who have been harmed in the mental health system. If you would like to report psychiatric abuse, click here.

CCHR also works to ensure patient and consumer protections are enacted and upheld as there is rampant abuse in the field of mental health.  In this role, CCHR has helped to enact more than 150 laws worldwide, protecting individuals from abusive or coercive mental health practices since it was formed over 50 years ago. Watch Our Mission Statement Video:

Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights: All human rights organisations set forth codes by which they align their purposes and activities. CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights articulates the guiding principles and goals of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). Human rights include the right to one’s own mind, and to protect oneself and one’s loved ones against any abusive or harmful “treatments” given under the guise of mental health. Every man, woman and child is entitled to the fundamental human rights set forth in this Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights, regardless of race, political ideology, religious, cultural or social beliefs. Given the fact that there are virtually no human or civil rights to protect citizens from mental health abuses, it is vital that rights be recognised and that all countries adopt this Declaration.

How CCHR Was Established

CCHR was co-founded as an independent mental health watchdog in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus Dr Thomas Szasz at a time when patients were being warehoused in institutions, abused, stripped of their constitutional, civil and human rights, and left without recourse.

As CCHR’s co-founder, Thomas Szasz stated “They were then the only organisation, and they still are the only organisation, who were active in trying to free mental patients who were incarcerated in mental hospitals with whom there was nothing wrong, who had committed no crimes, who wanted to get out of the hospital. And that to me was a very worthwhile cause; it’s still a very worthwhile cause.”

CCHR has long fought to restore basic unalienable human rights to the field of mental health, including, but not limited to, full informed consent regarding the medical legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis, the risks of psychiatric treatments, the right to all available medical alternatives, and the right to refuse any treatment considered harmful. CCHR does not advocate for any particular medical, educational or particular treatment, but does advocate for giving people alternatives and resources to assist them in finding non-harmful solutions, featured on CCHR’s website here.

More About CCHR

Our Stance on Psychiatric Drugs: People frequently ask if CCHR is of the opinion that no one should ever take psychiatric drugs, but this website is not dedicated to opinion. It is dedicated to providing information that a multi-billion dollar psycho/pharmaceutical industry does not want people to have. For this reason CCHR created the psychiatric drug side effects search engine. which consists solely of international drug regulatory warnings, published studies and adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Regarding psychiatric diagnosis, it is not a matter of opinion about whether mental disorders are “real” but whether there are valid medical tests to prove mental disorders are medical conditions requiring the administration of mind-altering and potentially lethal psychiatric drugs— and the answer is no. The pertinent question is this: Do people have a right to all the information about A) the documented risks of psychiatric drugs; B) the medical validity of the psychiatric diagnosis for which drugs are being prescribed; C) to be given non-harmful medical alternatives to psychiatric drugs/treatment and D) and the right to refuse any treatment the patient considers harmful. CCHR’s answer to all of these questions is yes.

Our Stance on Psychiatric Disorders: The psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year in order to convince the public, legislators and the press that psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), etc., are medical diseases on par with verifiable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.  CCHR has been pointing out the lack of science to back these claims for decades, now key high profile individuals within the mental health industry have backed what CCHR has said all long:

‘Mental illness’ is terribly misleading because the ‘mental disorders’ we diagnose are no more than descriptions of what clinicians observe people do or say, not at all well established diseases

Allen Frances, Psychiatrist and former DSM-IV Task Force Chairman, April 2015

While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary…. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.

Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, 2013

This fact is this: psychiatric labels are not diseases they are marketing campaigns. It is simply a way to maintain their hold on a billions of dollars-a-year psychiatric drug industry (over $12 billion annually in Australia) that is based on marketing and not science. Unlike real medical disease, there are no scientific tests to verify the medical existence of any psychiatric disorder. Despite decades of trying to prove mental disorders are biological brain conditions, due to chemical imbalances or genetic factors, psychiatry has failed to prove even one of their hundreds of so-called mental disorders is due to a faulty or “chemically imbalanced” brain. To counter this obvious flaw in their push to medicalise behaviours, the psychiatric industry will claim that there are certain medical conditions that do not have a verifiable test so this justifies the fact that there aren’t medical tests for mental illness. This is frankly a lame argument; Whereas there may be rare medical conditions that do not have a verifiable medical test, there are virtually no psychiatric disorders that can be verified medically as a physical abnormality/disease.

This is not to say people don’t get depressed, sad, troubled, anxious, nervous or even sometimes act psychotic. The question then is simple—is this due to some mental “disease” that can be verified as one would verify cancer or a real medical condition? And the answer is no.
To find out more about psychiatric diagnoses, click here.

CCHR has worked for more than 50 years for fully informed consent in the field of mental health, and the right to all the information regarding psychiatric diagnoses and treatment, not just the information coming from those with a vested interest in keeping them in the dark.

It is in this spirit that we present you with videos, news, medical experts and information designed to arm you with facts.

As a non-profit organisation, it is through public donations that we are able to continue our educational campaigns. For more information on donating to CCHR click here.