As the American Psychiatric Association (APA) held its annual meeting in Los Angeles, a diverse coalition of human rights advocates, civil rights leaders, clergy, medical professionals, and attorneys rallied outside the convention center, demanding an end to deadly and coercive psychiatric practices. Led by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), a psychiatric industry watchdog, the protest at the Los Angeles Convention Center focused on lethal restraint deaths of children, the widespread use of forced treatment, and the lack of accountability in a mental health system that received $329 billion in federal funding in 2022 alone.
At the heart of the protest, joined by human rights activists from around the U.S., Spain, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere, children’s lives were lost to psychiatric restraint. Ja’Ceon Terry, 7, and Cornelius Frederick, 16, both African American foster children, died after being forcibly restrained in psychiatric facilities. Most recently, 12-year-old Clark Harman lost his life at a North Carolina behavioral therapy camp.
In each case, medical examiners ruled the deaths were homicides. Yet, accountability has been minimal or nonexistent.
“These are preventable deaths. These are crimes,” said Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International. “The APA’s continued failure to denounce and prohibit violent restraints, forced drugging, and electroshock treatment constitutes complicity in torture and child abuse.” Staggering Harm, Alarming Statistics.
The protest highlighted a series of harrowing facts illustrating systemic harm:
• Over 37 percent of child and youth psychiatric inpatients in the U.S. have been
subjected to seclusion or restraints — often for non-threatening behavior.
• A Cornell University study found that such interventions are frequently triggered by “rela-
tively benign behaviors.”
• In California, 17 deaths occurred in just 21 for-profit psychiatric hospitals across six years
amid 300 serious violations, including assaults and improper restraints.
• A Los Angeles Times investigation documented 100 preventable deaths, including
suicides and homicides, in California psychiatric facilities over 10 years.
• Major hospital chains have faced federal investigations and at least $580 million in jury
awards for child sexual abuse in their institutions.
• The use of electroshock therapy rose 39 percent in California between 2021 and 2023,
even after a state Supreme Court ruling required manufacturers to warn patients about
brain damage risks.
Psychiatry Wastes $329 Billion CCHR sharply criticized the staggering $329 billion in federal mental health spending in 2022, noting a 315 percent increase since 2000 while the U.S. population grew only 18 percent. Yet no substantial improvement in public mental health outcomes has followed.
• The U.S. remains among the saddest coutries in the world, with record levels of suicides and psychiatric drug-related deaths.
• Well over 76 million Americans — including 6.1 million children — are prescribed
psychotropic drugs linked to emotional numbing, sexual dysfunction, suicide,
withdrawal effects, and even homicide.
“This is not healthcare — it’s a $329 billion failure built on legalized assault,” Eastgate said. “Children have died crying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Psychiatry must be held accountable.” Racial Disparities and “Chemical Racism” Rev. Frederick Shaw, Jr., president of the NAACP Inglewood-South Bay branch, con demned the disproportionate use of coercive psychiatry on African Americans:
• Black patients are more likely to be prescribed high doses of antipsychotics, which double the risk of developing tardive dyskinesia, a disfiguring neurological disorder.
• Today, over 27 percent of Black youth in the U.S. are labeled with “oppositional defiant disorder.”
• Rev. Shaw drew parallels to the 1960s when Black civil rights activists were labeled with
“protest psychosis” and forcibly drugged: “Their dissent was just— yet psychiatry orchestrated their suppression to silence and control them with antipsychotics. Today, there is a continuation of entrenched psychiatric racism.”
Eastgate concluded, “Until the APA acts to prohibit coercive and deadly practices, psychiatry will continue to harm under the guise of ‘care’—and children and many others will continue to die. There must be accountability for these abuses, and the APA must be held responsible for allowing them to persist.”