CCHR framed its message as both a human rights question and a public health imperative, aligning its asks with recent World Health Organization and UN Human Rights Office guidance that calls for eliminating coercion in mental health services and rewriting national laws accordingly.
If the numbers are stark, the survivor accounts are devastating.
In both its written statement and oral testimony, CCHR highlighted electroshock of minors worldwide, the surge in child antipsychotic prescribing, and seclusion and restraint deaths in US for-profit psychiatric hospitals—supporting the CRPD on its call for governments to adopt rights-based alternatives.
The Geneva debate didn’t happen in isolation. In 2025, psychiatric association policy and fresh evidence have sharpened the fault lines between abolitionists who call for a global ban on coercive psychiatry and institutional agendas now proceeding in the opposite direction.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in February, for example, endorsed widening access to ECT for minors, a move Eastgate warns “normalizes brutalizing children.” At the same time, a July 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of New York study reports that involuntary hospitalization nearly doubles the risk of suicide or overdose within three months of discharge while also nearly doubling the chance of being charged with a violent crime—evidence that underscores the dangers of coercive psychiatry.
If the numbers are stark, the survivor accounts are devastating. For example, Charlotte (her name, like those of other victims in this story, has been changed for anonymity), underwent 74 ECT sessions over five years. Once a working academic, she now describes a permanent haze: autobiographical memory wiped away, intellect blunted and her career ended by damage confirmed in neuropsychological testing. “There is this sort of mist, haze in your mind when you’re having ECT that affects your memory. I was like a zombie,” she told researchers.
Harriet, shocked six times, recalls herself before ECT as “a reading and learning machine.” Now, she cannot work or read as she once did—and cannot remember her own children growing up. Paula, another patient, lost the ability to retain enough information to enjoy books, while Stella discovered on returning home that she couldn’t recognize familiar faces. Cooking or even shopping became a challenge, her short-term memory shattered.
These stories, documented in recent research and reported by Freedom, illustrate what CCHR describes as sanctioned harm masquerading as “medicine.”
The experiences aren’t isolated: A global survey of more than 1,100 ECT recipients and their family members validated accounts, likening the procedure to a cinder block dropped on the head or a grenade exploding inside the body—metaphors of violence that echo Charlotte’s, Harriet’s, Paula’s and Stella’s lived reality. It is precisely this combination of personal testimony and international data that set the stage for Geneva’s debate on coercion. For CCHR, such empirical warnings accentuate why the mental health watchdog has spent decades fighting—and winning—bans on ECT for children, from California in 1976 to Texas in 1993 and Western Australia in 2014, proof that entrenched practices can be dismantled when governments act to protect rights.
CCHR Executive Director Fran Andrews told the committee that, despite pockets of reform, “children as young as five” can still be electroshocked in the US, a country that signed the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009.
The data points in CCHR’s presentation ran global. A 2022 population-based study using Sweden’s national ECT register documented the administration of ECT to patients under the age of 19 and detailed use among adolescents. Companion European reporting, as Eastgate outlined in her Geneva speech, has noted cases as young as six in Sweden and usage in teenagers in the Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark and Germany.
In the US, children as young as seven are warehoused and some have died in restraints at for-profit psychiatric facilities.
The watchdog’s testimony also flagged psychotropic prescribing trends for youth. In Britain, antipsychotic prescribing to children and adolescents has increased over the past two decades, with Risperdal the most commonly prescribed agent in many subgroups of users. Internationally, researchers note substantial growth in pediatric antipsychotic usage—with well-documented risks like weight gain, metabolic syndrome and movement disorders. Clinicians and regulators also warn of far graver outcomes: Risperdal has been linked to stroke, seizures, uncontrolled muscle spasms and neuroleptic malignant syndrome—a potentially fatal reaction marked by high fever, stiff muscles and confusion.
In her interview with Freedom, Eastgate singled out Johnson & Johnson’s Risperdal and the pharmaceutical giant’s alleged corporate knowledge of side effects such as gynecomastia—a condition marked by an enlargement of breast tissue in boys. “They’ve been profiting while covering up the side effects, and psychiatrists have colluded with them in this,” she said, adding: “How criminal is that?” Eastgate described an attorney’s harrowing story of a child who bound his chest with bandages, desperate to disguise his swelling breasts—“he was so embarrassed about their growth.” For CCHR, such stories underscore the need to treat cosmetic disfigurement and metabolic damage alongside life-threatening risks like suicide and stroke as part of the same continuum of harm—all of which, in the watchdog’s view, demand not just regulatory reform but criminal accountability.
At the Geneva meeting, the human rights message loomed large, with CCHR’s testimony keyed to the CRPD’s Article 15 prohibition on “torture or … cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Both Eastgate and Andrews stressed that electroshock, forced drugging and seclusion are outright human rights violations. Independent legal scholars at Harvard Law School’s Project on Disability have likewise argued that such practices may constitute torture under international law—reinforcing the central theme of the Geneva session.
Eastgate pointed to the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Unit in New Zealand’s Lake Alice Hospital as a cautionary tale of what happens when “treatment” overruns rights. There, a Royal Commission of Inquiry confirmed that from 1972 through 1978, children had been subjected to electroshock without anesthetic, drugging and physical abuse in what the investigation referred to as “a culture of impunity that enabled and normalized acts of abuse and torture.” A new mental health bill in that same nation, Eastgate said, uses the word “compulsory” hundreds of times (465 times, to be precise), vastly outstripping references to “rights.”
Meanwhile, in the US, children as young as seven are warehoused and some have died in restraints at for-profit psychiatric facilities, their deaths ruled homicides. Across Europe, thousands are still subjected each year to involuntary admission, restraint or electroshock. These examples, CCHR argued, show why embedding mental health reform in international human rights law is essential—because without enforceable rights, systemic abuse across the world is easily rebranded as “care.”
It was against this backdrop of systemic abuse that CCHR thanked the CRPD for acting decisively. The organization urged the Committee to call for a global ban on electroshock, while reinforcing its stance on prohibiting forced drugging and mechanical or chemical restraints. Further, CCHR called for the imposition of criminal penalties for perpetrators of psychiatric abuse, with enforcement outcomes made transparent and public.
Just as important, CCHR called for universal adoption of an international human rights–based mental health system, emphasizing autonomy, informed consent and an abolition of coercion. For Eastgate and Andrews, these measures aren’t optional reforms but the only way to ensure that tragedies don’t repeat.
So where might the UN land? Eastgate said in her Freedom interview that the near-term goal is to enact statutes—pushing European and other jurisdictions to align laws with the CRPD in moving to eliminate—rather than expand—ECT.
As the session adjourned in Geneva, Eastgate left the Committee with a call that stretched far beyond the Palais Wilson: “Upholding autonomy, dignity and liberty is non-negotiable. Rights-based alternatives must replace outdated, violent psychiatric practices.”
Whether governments act on that challenge—or let electroshock, forced drugging, seclusion and restraint continue—will decide if 2025 marks the beginning of a global shift to rights-based mental health practices, where “care” needn’t be placed in quotes.
