You busily get to work, only to discover that the house is termite-infested, overrun with black mold, the pipes and the roof leak like sieves and the foundation is crumbling.
Sadly, you’re confronted with an unavoidable conclusion: The whole structure is rotten to the core, worthless and beyond repair.
The only thing to do is tear the whole thing down and start all over again.
“Mental health change is impossible without dismantling institutional corruption and ending coercive psychiatric practices.”
According to a new review published in the Harvard-affiliated Health and Human Rights journal, that is the status of the profit-driven, corrupt international psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries today.
“The evidence reviewed by Harvard [and other] scholars leaves no ambiguity,” wrote Jan Eastgate, president of Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR). “Mental health change is impossible without dismantling institutional corruption and ending coercive psychiatric practices.”
In other words, fixing the existing system is hopeless—greed and abuse have, like your old house, rotted it to the core.
In a devastating indictment, the review points directly to corruption involving, as patient rights advocate Richard Sears puts it, “systemic, often invisible forces that divert an institution from its stated goals and undermine its trustworthiness.
“This concept does not describe a broken system, but one that harms people when it operates exactly as intended.”
When governments around the world began stepping away from mental health, privatization stepped in. Private treatment facilities almost always cut corners to make more money.
Sears continued, “As governments grow to rely more on private providers, pharmaceutical companies and donor-driven programs, decisions about mental health care may be guided more by profit, efficiency or international agendas than by local needs or human rights principles.”
“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,” wrote Eastgate.
With speed and savings prioritized over care, involuntary commitment, restraints, forced drugging and even electroshock have become the norm in many private institutions.
The result is that mental health suffers in “mental health” institutions.
“In the United States, suicide rates rose by 30 percent between 1999 and 2016 across all demographic groups,” CCHR writes. “A 2022 Harvard School of Public Health study further found that US 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.”
Over 80 percent of US psychiatric facilities for children and adolescents use restraints or seclusion—think “solitary confinement,” known to cause insanity.
Such involuntary commitment and forced “treatments,” CCHR states, are “practices long associated with discrimination, segregation and grave human rights abuses.”
Obviously the mental health treatment industry isn’t improving anyone’s mental health. And the Health and Human Rights review leaves little doubt why: greed.
If it’s too expensive to pay staff to keep an eye on patients, strap them down. If they’re giving you trouble, drug them into unconsciousness. If they fail to respond, hit them with electroshock. Go for the easiest and, above all, the cheapest solutions available, because profit, not patient care, is the goal.
Cost-cutting, profit-driven psychiatric institutions aren’t only an American problem. Between 2015 and 2016, when some 1,700 patients in South Africa’s Life Esidimeni scandal were moved from government care to unlicensed private facilities, 144 died. Forty-four more went missing.
At the heart of this machinery of abuse is a fundamental disregard for patients’ autonomy; psychiatric patients are routinely denied the right to informed consent.
“The principle of informed consent in medicine tells of a basic human right: Patients have a right to be told what is known about the pathology associated with a medical diagnosis and to be informed of the risks and benefits of any proposed treatment,” journalist Robert Whitaker wrote.
He noted that research in the 1980s and 1990s did not validate the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. But the American Psychiatric Association declined to publicize this fact, instead covering it up and burying the “poor long-term outcomes and poor public health outcomes associated with this paradigm of care.”
Psychiatry even endorsed the theory “as an extraordinary medical advance that elevated the prestige” of the industry, Whitaker wrote.
The pharmaceutical industry, in turn, seeing a chance to reap huge profits, jumped on board and, like illegal chemists in underground meth labs, began cranking out psychoactive drugs.
In place of this dangerous framework, CCHR and the World Health Organization are promoting a human rights–based approach to care and demand a rejection of involuntary commitment laws, a ban on involuntary “treatments” like electroshock, and investigations into abuses in psychiatric hospitals, including forced drugging, restraint and seclusion.
This approach, indeed, involves trashing the current model of mental health “care” and replacing it with a system of respect, and of helping and assisting those in need. It would mean a major overhaul of the current systems, would dramatically eat into the staggering profits of greedy private facilities and pharmaceutical companies, and would remove the power of the psychiatric industry to kidnap people off the streets and hold them against their will, while profiting from insurance and taxpayer dollars.
As the psychiatric industry exists today, it is one of slavery, of torture, of inhumanity and of torment—all in service to the almighty dollar.
Indeed, it is time to tear it down and start all over again.
