Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) is urging parents and caregivers to seek independent facts before agreeing to prescription psychotropic drugs or psychiatric hospitalization for a child. The organization, a mental health industry watchdog established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and professor of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz, says families are often presented with marketing language, pressure from school mental health workers or hospitals, and incomplete risk information.
CCHR directs families to FightForKids.org when a school psychologist, psychiatrist, or facility proposes labeling, drugging, or locking up a child. That campaign helped produce the federal Prohibition on Mandatory Medication Amendment, which bars schools from forcing a parent to give a child a psychiatric drug as a condition of attending class. CCHR's work has also led to similar parental-rights laws in 10 states, some of which bar child-protective agencies from removing a child solely because parents refuse to administer a psychotropic drug.
The group's Parents Know Your Rights page explains that psychiatric diagnoses are made without confirmatory medical tests that prove a physical disease. It advises parents to insist on a full medical workup before anyone calls a child's distress a mental illness, because studies show untreated physical conditions can look like psychiatric symptoms. CCHR documents drug side effects and points families toward non-drug medical and educational options for attention, learning, and behavior problems.
"A psychiatric 'diagnosis' is not a lab finding. It is a checklist of behaviors, voted into a manual, then used to justify mind-altering drugs and locked wards," said Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International. "Parents must be told what those drugs can do to a developing brain, what can happen behind a locked door, and that they have the legal right to refuse."
CCHR also warns against companies that forcibly transport troubled teens to psychiatric and behavioral residential treatment facilities and wilderness camps. Distressed families have paid $2,000 to $4,000, plus consultant fees of up to $10,000, to have children taken from bed at night and driven to locked programs thousands of miles from home, according to a CCHR report at cchrint.org. About 40,000 children, including some from Canada, sit in U.S. behavioral facilities. The U.S. behavioral market was valued at $92.14 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $132.46 billion by 2032. By 2015, 82% of residential facilities still used seclusion and restraints. At least 145 children died of preventable causes in residential centers over three decades; at least 62 died from asphyxiation or restraint injury.
A CCHR white paper this year cited research that up to 45% of inpatient psychiatric patients reported sexual violence during admission. The Joint Commission reported a 77% rise in hospital assault incidents over two years, nearly half of them sexual. CCHR says parents should treat locked psychiatric and residential programs as high-risk settings, not a default safe place. Public records, lawsuits, inspections, and criminal cases involving major behavioral hospital chains have repeatedly shown staff sexual crimes against patients, weak background checks, delayed reports to police, and peer assaults on units executives were paid to supervise. Civil awards and settlements have reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
More than 80 facilities of one large chain—about 32% of its sites in more than 20 states—have been under federal or state investigation, with more than 500 patient complaints logged since 2022. In 2023, that company paid $400 million to settle three sexual-abuse cases involving an eight-year-old at a closed New Mexico facility. Recent cases across multiple states have included convictions and charges against nurses, counselors, aides, and executives connected to youth behavioral hospitals; license sanctions; hospital closures; and lawsuits alleging children as young as seven or eight were sexually assaulted while confined.
For business leaders and investors, the data underscore reputational and liability risks in a sector projected to grow to $132.46 billion by 2032. CCHR recommends that legislators mandate national public reporting of restraints, seclusion, injuries, deaths, staffing, and ownership; automatic license suspension or closure after findings of serious harm; criminal and civil liability for executives and clinicians when abuse is systemic; an end to seclusion and mechanical restraint; and Government Accountability Office and HHS Office of Inspector General investigations of marketing and billing incentives that fill these beds.
"Parents cannot rely on the facility to police itself," Eastgate said. "Get the facts first. Then use the law."
