Curated News
By: NewsRamp Editorial Staff
September 14, 2026
UN Embraces Szasz's Warning Against Forced Psychiatry
TLDR
- CCHR leverages UN and WHO doctrine to advance its global campaign against coercive psychiatry, gaining ground on abolition of forced treatment.
- UN CRPD and WHO guidance now oppose involuntary psychiatric detention, citing evidence from Swedish and US studies showing elevated suicide rates.
- Szasz's legacy promotes liberty and dignity for people with psychiatric labels, aligning with global efforts to end coercive practices and protect autonomy.
- Thomas Szasz, co-founder of CCHR, argued that involuntary hospitalization is imprisonment, not medicine, a view now reflected in UN human rights doctrine.
Impact - Why it Matters
This news matters because it signals a profound shift in how the world views involuntary psychiatric treatment. For decades, forced hospitalization and drugging were accepted as compassionate care. Now, the UN and WHO classify such practices as human-rights violations akin to torture. This impacts anyone who could be subjected to coercive psychiatry, their families, and policymakers. The mounting evidence of harm—including dramatically elevated suicide rates after involuntary discharge—demands urgent reform. Szasz's lifelong battle against psychiatric coercion is finally being validated on a global stage, and that validation could lead to real protections for individual liberty and bodily autonomy in mental health care.
Summary
Dr. Thomas Szasz, the late psychiatrist, SUNY professor, and co-founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), spent decades arguing that involuntary psychiatric hospitalization is imprisonment, not medicine. That once-radical view is now embedded in United Nations human-rights doctrine. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and its committee call for abolishing forced psychiatric treatment and detention, while the World Health Organization urges governments to end coercive practices. CCHR is highlighting this alignment and honoring Szasz, who taught at SUNY from 1956 until 1990 and co-founded CCHR in 1969.
Szasz called commitment 'a crime against humanity' and insisted it should be abolished. Congressman Ron Paul praised him as 'one of those rare individuals who could not be silent when liberty was threatened,' and Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote that Szasz's 'passion against coercion' remains 'more relevant today than ever.' CCHR International President Jan Eastgate, who worked with Szasz for decades, said: 'Commitment is not treatment. It is captivity justified as care—liberty taken because of a psychiatric label, not a crime.' The CRPD Committee prohibits involuntary placement and treatment without exceptions, and the World Psychiatric Association has conceded that compulsory treatment, seclusion, and chemical restraint collide with liberty and freedom from torture.
Evidence continues to mount: a Karolinska Institutet study of 72,275 people under involuntary psychiatric care in Sweden found 2,104 suicides—about 55 times the general population rate. A 2017 JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis put post-discharge suicide risk at 100 times the global rate in the first three months. Szasz, a Holocaust refugee who wrote that Nazi killing 'was a medical matter,' lived to see the German psychiatric association admit its role in the Nazi euthanasia program. CCHR, founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology, continues his mission to restore human rights in mental health and end psychiatric coercion. Szasz's warning is not a relic; it is a living global movement.
Source Statement
This curated news summary relied on content distributed by 24-7 Press Release. Read the original source here, UN Embraces Szasz's Warning Against Forced Psychiatry
