the _alf blog

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Interview with a Scientologist: What is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights?

Interviewer: What is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights?

Scientologist: The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a Church of Scientology sponsored social reform organization formed in 1969 to expose and eradicate criminal acts and human rights abuses by psychiatry. There are 118 CCHR chapters in 27 countries throughout the world. These chapters investigate psychiatric abuses and bring these to the attention of the media, legislators and law enforcement agencies.

CCHR is not anti-psychiatry. Rather, it opposes brutal practices, and its aim is to end the use psychosurgery, electroshock treatment and the administration of dangerous psychiatric drugs that have destroyed the minds and lives of millions of individuals.

And Scientologists believe that the treatment of mentally caused ills should not be divorced from the field of religion. Psychiatry has attempted to preempt this religious role.

Professor Thomas Szasz, author of The Manufacture of Madness, said of CCHR at its 25th anniversary celebrations in February of 1994:

“We should all honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never been done in human history before.”