CCHR PROTESTS PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE AT THE WORLD PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION CONGRESS
CCHR protesters were right on the doorstep of the annual World Psychiatric Association Congress, protesting abuses in the field of mental health and demanding reform.
As psychiatrists from across the world arrived at the Congress Center Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal, for the annual World Psychiatric Association (WPA) Congress, they never expected what would greet them—CCHR protesters from across Europe demanding the abolition of damaging psychiatric practices. They stood right at the Congress Center’s front door with banners proclaiming “Psychiatry Destroys Our Children,” “Psychiatry: Lies That Destroy Families and Lives” and “Report Psychiatric Drug Abuse of Children.”
Psychiatrists came to protesters to learn more, taking CCHR portfolios with facts and vital information for their personal perusal.
To ensure facts and information were available to locals, the CCHR Traveling Exhibit was opened at the top theater in Portugal, the Coliseu dos Recreios, for seven days. The exhibit exposes psychiatry’s barbaric history. The WPA also had their own video showing at their Congress that, as one attendee put it, explored “the less positive sides of the history of psychiatry.”
But it is not just past abuses, but present ones that CCHR protested, especially of the propensity of psychiatry to use dangerous drugs or other inhumane solutions for their patients, including involuntary commitment, restraints and electroshock. One WPA lecturer made the apt observation with a quote in their own PowerPoint, “Writing a prescription is easy, but coming to an understanding with patients is hard.”
As there is more and more awareness of the dangers of psychotropic drugs and that they are not the panacea of all mental problems, psychiatrists came to protesters to learn more, taking CCHR portfolios with facts and vital information for their personal perusal.
This included an open letter from CCHR to the WPA posted on a large board at the entrance, with hundreds of attendees stopping to read it. The letter pointed out that, while the psychiatric community has claimed a monopoly on the field of mental health, they have not used it to “deliver treatment that aims at curing and ensuring true recovery.” The letter lays out a litany of stats and abuses that prove this, ultimately ending with the demand that “this must end now. Stop killing psychiatric patients.”
