In the 1980s, CCHR investigated and exposed the use of “deep sleep” at the Chelmsford psychiatric facility in Sydney, Australia. Victims were kept in a drug-enforced comatose state for weeks at a time, during which the psychiatrists repeatedly battered them with brain-damaging electric shocks. Deep sleep was subsequently banned and a Royal Commission, the highest form of government inquiry in Australia, was convened to follow up on CCHR’s charges.
“The campaign by CCHR in relation to Chelmsford and to obtain a Royal Commission was the most sustained and thorough exercise in whistle-blowing, investigatory reporting and public interest work in the history of this country bar none!” declared Patrick Griffin, attorney with Sydney’s Public Interest Advocacy Centre, a nonprofit organization which represented many of Chelmsford’s unwitting victims.
In 1986, a report of the United Nations Human Rights Commission acknowledged that “CCHR has been responsible for many great reforms. At least 30 bills throughout the world, which would otherwise have inhibited even more the rights of mental patients, or would have given psychiatry the power to commit minority groups and individuals against their will, have been defeated by CCHR actions.4
“CCHR has been instrumental in securing the release from mental hospitals of patients who were held there against their will. It has brought about public awareness of the existence of the many abuses in the psychiatric field....
Advancing the Cause of Human Rights continued...
    
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