For those involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities and forcibly treated, it is an inhumane and unjustifiable curtailment of civil liberties. In 2020, CCHR’s Task Force Against Racism & Modern-Day Eugenics was formed, in part, to prevent such curtailment. Psychiatric institutionalization—including involuntarily—has led to African Americans being restrained and killed. Numerous international human rights treaties support a ban on forced hospitalization and coercive psychiatric practices, including restraint use. While some treaties may not be ratified and legally binding in U.S. law, they reflect the direction that mental health laws urgently need to go to instill human rights and protections.

Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics Joins Calls for APA President and Columbia University Psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman to Resign All Advisory and Executive Positions in Light of Blatant Racist Tweet

With a 50-year history of fighting against psychiatric racism in South Africa and the U.S., watchdog praises inquest after five years investigating 144 psychiatric patient deaths. Warns against SA patients being returned to past apartheid-entrenched facilities; effective medical facilities needed.

The Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics announced its support for current federal consideration of legislation to ban police use of chokehold restraints. But it also wants prohibition of such restraint use extended to behavioral institutions, where teens have died.

Following the American Psychiatric Association apologizing for perpetuating racism, the Task Force Against Racism & Modern-Day Eugenics wants statutes of psychiatry’s “father,” Benjamin Rush, a slave owner, removed.

The APA’s apology on January 18, 2021 for decades of psychiatry’s racist harm comes when “mental health” research funds are now available to study the impact of racism and will lead only to more minorities being targeted and drugged.

Rev. Frederick Shaw champions a campaign through CCHR and his Task Force Against Institutional Racism in the PsychiatricIndustry to stop the use of restraints that has led to so many lost African American lives. The tragedy of Cornelius Frederick in May 2020 raises concerns about institutional racism in the mental health and foster care/juvenile detention systems. As the 16-year old was restrained in a psychiatric facility for throwing a sandwich on the floor.

Rev. Fred Shaw wants to protect fellow African Americans from Psychotropic Drug Dangers, “Minority Mental Health Month was started with good intentions by author and advocate, the late Bebe Moore Campbell, but it’s been used to further target African Americans, Hispanics and others, getting them, hooked on damaging psychotropic drugs and even electroshocked.” – Rev. Frederick Shaw

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.”

Rev Fred Shaw, President of the NAACP Inglewood-South Bay Branch in California, 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.’”

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.