The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a Church-sponsored social reform organization formed in 1969 to expose and eradicate criminal acts and human rights abuses by psychiatry. There are 118 CCHR chapters in 27 countries throughout the world. These chapters investigate psychiatric abuses and bring these to the attention of the media, legislators and law enforcement agencies.

CCHR is not anti-psychiatry. Rather, it opposes brutal practices, and its aim is to end the use psychosurgery, electroshock treatment and the administration of dangerous psychiatric drugs that have destroyed the minds and lives of millions of individuals.

And Scientologists believe that the treatment of mentally caused ills should not be divorced from the field of religion. Psychiatry has attempted to preempt this religious role.

Professor Thomas Szasz, author of The Manufacture of Madness, said of CCHR at its 25th anniversary celebrations in February 1994:

“We should all honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never been done in human history before.”

Through the work of CCHR, public awareness of the destructive results of psychiatric methods has been raised and major steps have been taken to outlaw such practices.

In 1986, CCHR was credited in a United Nations report with responsibility for the introduction and passage of at least 30 pieces of legislation to improve the rights of individuals faced with the possibility of psychiatric treatment. Today that figure stands at 100.

CCHR is also responsible for the UN’s first Bill of Rights for Mental Patients.

As a result of CCHR’s actions, 877 psychiatrists have been criminally charged in recent years and 376 were jailed for their crimes.

522 psychiatric hospitals have been closed and a total of $600 million in fines has been imposed on psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions. Dozens of hospitals and psychiatrists are still under investigation for crimes such as fraud, infliction of bodily harm, sexual abuse and other felonies.

An estimated 400,000 individuals have been saved from having to undergo electric shock treatment and 20,000 from being subjected to lobotomies due to CCHR’s work.