illi News - CCHR: Harvard Review Exposes Institutional Corruption in Global Mental Health

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A landmark Harvard-affiliated review finds that profit-driven biomedical psychiatry has obstructed human rights-based mental health care, fueling coercion, unsafe drug use, and systemic abuses worldwide.

LOS ANGELES - illiNews -- By CCHR International

The mental health industry watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) welcomed a major review that Harvard University's Health and Human Rights journal published, which reviewed four decades of global mental health policy, concluding that the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry's dominance of biomedical approaches has obstructed human rights progress. The report, Examining Institutional Corruption in Mental Health: A Key to Transformative Human Rights Approaches, finds that global mental health governance has been driven by a failed model that conflicts with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which calls for human-rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health.[1]

The editors and contributing authors documented how mental health systems have expanded coverage "without adequate attention to the content and quality of care," while accelerating privatization and pharmaceutical dependence. They warn that multinational drug corporations have extracted enormous profits in ways that "undermine the health and well-being of patients and the public."

Case studies from multiple regions show how financial incentives and the global export of Western biomedical narratives, including the discredited "chemical imbalance" theory, driving antidepressant sales, have entrenched coercive practices and dangerous drug use.[2] One paper concludes that "institutional corruption, rooted in guild interests," led U.S. psychiatry to misrepresent its evidence base, influencing the World Health Organization that endorsed frameworks and spreading a paradigm built on inaccurate claims of safety and effectiveness. This model, the author reports, has contributed to worsening public mental health outcomes worldwide.

In the United States, suicide rates rose by 30% between 1999 and 2016 across all demographic groups. A 2022 Harvard School of Public Health study further found that U.S. psychiatric hospitals continue to subject incarcerated individuals to forced electroshock, chemical restraints, and prolonged mechanical restraints—practices that violate the United Nations Convention against Torture.[3]

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Research recently published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology reinforces these findings. A scoping review of forced psychiatric drugging found that individuals consistently experienced non-consensual treatment as violent, dehumanizing, and traumatizing. Participants described feeling legally entrapped and silenced, using terms such as "assault," "torture," and "violation" to convey the physical and psychological harm endured.[4]

Internationally, momentum is shifting away from coercion. On December 5, 2025, the European Parliamentary Assembly rejected the proposed Additional Protocol to the Oviedo Convention, which would have expanded forced psychiatric detention and treatment. The protocol faced strong opposition from civil society groups, including CCHR, former human rights commissioners, and United Nations bodies, including the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.[5]

The contrast with the United States is stark. More than 80% of U.S. psychiatric facilities treating children and adolescents still employ seclusion or restraints, while new federal and state initiatives seek to expand involuntary commitment and forced treatment—reviving practices long associated with discrimination, segregation, and grave human rights abuses.[6]

The Harvard-reviewed papers argue that abandoning coercion and adopting human-rights-based, non-medicalized approaches is essential to ending systemic harm. As the authors conclude, confronting institutional corruption in mental health is not optional—it is an urgent global human rights imperative.

Some of the papers examined by the researchers included:

One paper by Lisa Cosgrove, "Addressing the Global Mental Health Crisis: How a Human Rights Approach Can Help End the Search for Pharmaceutical Magic Bullets," documents how global mental health policy remains dominated by pharmaceutical solutions despite poor outcomes. Cosgrove concludes that "institutional corruption, manifested through conflicts of interest and guild influence, undermines scientific integrity and public trust," perpetuating a failed biomedical paradigm.
Another analysis, "Without Informed Consent: The Global Export of a Failed Paradigm of Care," finds that the U.S. biomedical model of psychiatry was promoted alongside psychiatric drugs without providing patients or the public with adequate information about risks, limitations, or lack of long-term benefit. The paper notes that the widely promoted "chemical imbalance" theory was never scientifically validated and that research consistently fails to show improved long-term recovery from psychiatric drug use and rendering meaningful informed consent impossible.
In "Reflections on Institutional Corruption in Mental Health Policy Implementation: Global Insights and the Eastern European Experience," Dainius Pūras, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, and Julie Hannah examine how authoritarian institutional cultures persisted after the fall of the Soviet Union. They identify the biomedical model as a major barrier to reform and call for a non-coercive, human rights-based system grounded in dignity and autonomy.

Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International, said: "The evidence reviewed by Harvard scholars leaves no ambiguity: mental health reform is impossible without dismantling institutional corruption and ending coercive practices. Human rights-based approaches are not optional—they are the only path that restores dignity, autonomy, and protection from psychiatric abuse."

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CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late professor of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz. CCHR has been responsible for securing hundreds of laws globally to protect mental health patients' rights.

Sources:

[1] Alicia Ely Yamin, Camila Gianella Malca, and Daniela Cepeda Cuadrado, "Examining Institutional Corruption in Mental Health: A Key to Transformative Human Rights Approaches," Harvard University Health and Human Rights, 2025, www.hhrjournal.org/2025/12/08/examining-institutional-corruption-in-mental-health-a-key-to-transformative-human-rights-approaches/

[2] "When Mental Health Systems Harm: Institutional Corruption and Human Rights," MAD, www.madinamerica.com/2025/12/when-mental-health-systems-harm-institutional-corruption-and-human-rights/

[3] Matthew S. Smith & Michael Ashley Stein, "When Does Mental Health Coercion Constitute Torture?: Implications of Unpublished U.S. Immigration Judge Decisions Denying Non-Refoulement Protection," Fordham International Law Journal, Vol 45:5, 2022, ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ilj/vol45/iss5/2/

[4] "The Subjective Experience of Forced Psychiatric Medication: A Scoping Review Interpreted Through the Power Threat Meaning Framework," Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 2025, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00221678251396670

[5] Carmen Leyte, "Draft Additional Protocol to the Convention on human rights and biomedicine (Oviedo Convention) concerning the protection of human rights and dignity of persons with regard to involuntary placement and involuntary treatment within mental healthcare services," Parliamentary Assembly, 5 Dec. 2025; europeantimes.news/2025/12/council-of-europe-assembly-unanimously-rejects-protocol-on-involuntary-measures-mental-health/

[6] pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25733324/