Following Detailed Reports on Serbian Mental Institutions

LOS ANGELES: The international psychiatric watchdog group Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) said systematic child abuse in Serbian mental institutions, exposed in the report by Mental Disability Rights International, stresses the necessity for urgent measures by governments to protect the most vulnerable from psychiatric abuse. CCHR has a long history of fighting psychiatric abuse of children internationally, and maintains that the recent report on Serbian psychiatric facilities is only the latest in a long line of mistreatment and misuse of power by the mental health industry.

The report reveals emaciated children strapped to metal cribs, with little or no human contact, are left immobile in beds for so long their growth is severely stunted. With a lack of real medical care for these patients, disease runs rampant among them. For years, CCHR has been documenting and exposing the deadly use of psychiatric restraints, powerful drugs, psychosurgery and electroshock upon children. In 2004, CCHR exposed children kept in caged beds in mental institutions in Hungary and the Czech Republic, resulting in the ban of this practice for all ages.

While these conditions in Eastern Europe may sound remote, in 1998 and 1999, working with legislators and the press, CCHR uncovered 150 restraint deaths in the U.S., including children and teenagers, with the youngest victim only six years old. In 1999, federal regulations were adopted prohibiting the use of physical and chemical restraints to coerce or discipline psychiatric patients. CCHR also helped to secure a ban on electroshock (ECT) and psychosurgery for children under 12 in California, a ban on ECT for under 16-year-olds in Texas and also a ban in Piedmonte, Italy against ECT use for children, the elderly and pregnant women.

In the U.S., children entrusted to state psychiatric care are also frequently targeted for violent physical, as well as chemical, restraints. Psychiatric drugging of foster children has become widespread in American society. Last year, more than 18,000 Medicaid children in Florida alone were prescribed antipsychotics, which can cause brain damage, permanent tics and diabetes. Former Texas State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn revealed that in Texas alone, conservatively $4 million annually is spent on antipsychotics and antidepressants for foster children.

In response to the psychiatric industry's heavy reliance on harmful "treatments" for children, CCHR has launched a new "Fight For Kids" campaign—warning of the suicide and violence inducing side effects of antidepressants, prescribed to millions of children, in a new series of PSAs on child drugging, which have already been translated into 15 languages. The group says it will be releasing additional PSA series on restraint, involuntary commitment and electroshock and other so-called "treatments" all containing the slogan, "Get the Facts. Fight Back," in order to end the psychiatric abuse of children.

To view the first series of PSAs, go to www.cchr.org/psas/. Read The Silent Death of America's Children for more information about child abuse/deaths in the American mental health system.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights@cchr.org.