The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.
In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.
This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.
For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.
The Mental Health Human Rights Declaration was developed to cover the rights that all should be given, and that the systemic abuse of African Americans and people of color warrants additional rights. Every man, woman and child of any race is entitled to basic human rights set forth in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“If we really want to get down to the root of why all these [police] killings are happening, this warrior training 100% has to be put under a microscope and analyzed… If cops got less of this training, less people would die. There's no question about that.” —Craig Atkinson, Filmmaker and director of Do Not Resist
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Rev. Fred Shaw said the tragic death of Cornelius Frederick has sparked calls for a national ban on physical and chemical restraints in all psychiatric facilities. Michigan’s HHS said it “will change its policies to forbid the use of physical restraints in all its licensed and contracted facilities.”
Psychiatric restraints are socially invisible and should be prohibited. Like millions of others, we join in the calls for justice and a stop to racism, following the recent tragic death during a police restraint hold. We are encouraged by such a united voice and, as an extension of that, draw attention to “legal” restraint abuse that is not socially visible—behind psychiatric “hospital” walls.
Rev Fred Shaw, Executive Director of NAACP’s Inglewood-South Bay branch, announced a campaign to educate African Americans about the long history of their betrayal and other minorities in the psychiatric system, “We must fight for protections against damaging psychiatric treatment offered for the very real pain that racism and injustice brings and abolish the stereotypical labeling of this as a mental ‘disease.’”