SOCIAL
REFORM
Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)
Scientologists became outspoken critics of these abuses of the helpless and, by the mid-1950s, they mobilized to defeat what was dubbed “The Siberia Bill.” Officially named the Alaska Mental Health Bill, this was psychiatry’s attempt to establish a million-acre Siberia-type camp for mental health patients in Alaska, far from the prying eyes of civil libertarians. Incorporated in the bill was a “simplified commitment procedure.”
A less-than-alert Congress passed the bill unanimously in January 1956, but a massive campaign by Scientologists and civil rights groups ultimately eviscerated it.
Scientologists continued to speak out, but by 1969 it became obvious that self-imposed reforms in that field would never happen. (In fact, there was a resurgence of the more harmful practices and new and more powerful drugs were being developed as fast as they could be patented.) The Church thus formalized its opposition and formed the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). Headquartered in California, CCHR has grown to 128 chapters in 28 nations. For 30 years, CCHRs have successfully exposed psychiatric murders, hospital fraud, sexual abuse and inhumane conditions in mental institutions, and have been instrumental in passing legislation protecting the civil rights of mental patients.
In the 1970s, CCHR provided California legislators with documents and witnesses which led to the exposure of more than 100 unreported deaths at two State psychiatric institutions.
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