As Mental Health Awareness Week (October 4–10) prompts public reflection on psychological well-being, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) argues that awareness is hollow without confronting the persistent practice of involuntary detention and forced treatment. The group, founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Professor Thomas Szasz, has reissued its Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights, first published in 1969, to underscore rights that it says remain widely violated.
The declaration asserts the right not to be held in a psychiatric facility against one’s will and to refuse psychiatric drugs, electroshock, psychosurgery, brain stimulation, sterilization, narcotherapy, and deep-sleep treatment. It also demands full disclosure of risks before any such intervention. CCHR is simultaneously promoting its Psychiatric Living Will, an advance directive that individuals can sign and file with an attorney to document treatment refusals in advance.
Each year, an estimated 1.2 million Americans are involuntarily hospitalized for psychiatric reasons. A July 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff study found that people who had been involuntarily detained were nearly twice as likely to die by suicide or overdose within three months of release. A 2017 JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis found suicide risk in the first three months after psychiatric discharge was 100 times the global suicide rate. A 2023 Congressional Research Service report warned that involuntary commitment can implicate Fourteenth Amendment due process rights when liberty is taken on the basis of mental-health status, as detailed in https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47571;.
Courts still rely on standards such as “danger to self or others” or “unsound mind”—terms with no laboratory test to support or prove them, as seen in cases like https://law.justia.com/cases/illinois/court-of-appeals-fourth-appellate-district/2003/4021041.html. Once detained, patients may be forcibly drugged, restrained and electroshocked, despite ECT being documented to cause permanent memory loss and brain damage. International human-rights bodies have treated the use of forced electroshock as torture.
That population includes children and the elderly. Medicare data show 20,436 beneficiaries received electroshock in 2018; from 2016 through 2018 the program paid physicians $31 million to administer and monitor ECT, not counting anesthesiologists, as reported in https://www.cchrint.org/2021/05/17/cchr-urges-mental-health-month-oversight-of-elderly-being-electroshocked/. State-mandated reports from California, Illinois, and Vermont covering 62,602 patients through January 2019 found 30.3% (18,968) were 65 or older.
Validity of advance directives is a matter of state law, as explained by the https://elderlawauthority.com/advance-healthcare-directives-legal-requirements/. A form signed in one state is not automatically good in another. A psychiatric diagnosis does not, by itself, void a directive; the legal test is capacity at the time of signing, according to https://nationalelderlawauthority.com/advance-directive-legal-enforceability/. About half the states have a specific psychiatric advance-directive statute. States can still hospitalize a person who meets danger-to-self, danger-to-others, or grave-disability criteria. A living will may not block that hold, but it can name who speaks for the patient and what treatments are refused unless a court rules otherwise, per https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/psychiatric-advance-directives-1.
Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International, says, “Mental Health Awareness Week should be measured by whether forced detention and treatment are being dismantled, and by whether the public is told the risks of those practices. CCHR’s two instruments should be in public view: its Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights and a Psychiatric Living Will which every adult should sign, file with an attorney, and keep in their legal record so a written refusal exists before anyone seeks an involuntary commitment or forced treatment.”
