LOS ANGELES CA, September 18, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) is urging parents and caregivers to obtain independent facts before anyone recommends prescription psychotropic drugs or psychiatric hospitalization for a child. The organization says families are too often handed 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: schools cannot force a parent to give a child a psychiatric drug as a condition of attending class. CCHR's work produced similar parental-rights laws in 10 states. Some of those laws also bar child-protective agencies from removing a child solely because parents refuse to administer a psychotropic drug.

CCHR'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. The organization 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. 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," said Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International.

Do not hire a transport company to seize a child.

CCHR also warns parents against companies that forcibly transport "troubled" teens to psychiatric and behavioral residential treatment facilities and wilderness camps. Distressed families have paid $2,000–$4,000, and a consultant fee of up to $10,000 to have children taken from bed at night and driven to locked programs thousands of miles from home.[1]

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.[2]

Hospitalization is not a safe default

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.[3]

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 the 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. Families are advised to document injuries and records, ask who supervised the unit and who changed the drugs, and report suspected abuse to police—not only to the hospital.

CCHR recommends that parents:

• Use legal rights first. Review FightForKids.org and the Parents Know Your Rights page before a meeting with a school, doctor, or facility.
• Prefer educational and medical solutions for behavioral issues.
• Demand lab work and a differential medical exam.
• Refuse nighttime "goon squad" extractions from homes to out-of-state residential programs.
• If a child is already inside, keep demanding release. If refused, obtain an attorney and report the confinement to local police. Visit often and unannounced. Document bruises, sudden drug changes, missed school, and anything the child says about bathrooms, night staff, or other patients. Photograph injuries. Keep a log of who was on duty.
• If sexual or physical abuse is suspected, call police immediately and the state licensing agency the same day. Do not wait for the hospital's internal "investigation."
• If abuse already happened, preserve records, get independent medical and legal help, and file with police and the state health inspector. Provide CCHR a copy.

Recommendations for Legislators

CCHR recommends 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."

CCHR is a mental health industry watchdog that has operated for more than five decades, established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and eminent professor of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz. It investigates and exposes psychiatric abuse, educates the public about psychotropic drug risks, and works with lawmakers to protect parental rights and children.

Sources:

[1] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/07/12/abducting-troubled-teens-to-psychiatric-facilities/

[2] "Predictors of Seclusion or Restraint Use Within Residential Treatment Centers for Children and Adolescents," Psychiatric Quarterly, Dec. 2015; Annie Waldman, "Kids Get Hurt at Residential Schools While States Look On," ProPublica, 15 Dec. 2015

[3] "Lean staffing, lax hiring, training flaws: Why sexual assaults at hospitals are up," NBC News, 18 Nov. 2024

Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is an international mental health industry watchdog, established by the Church of Scientology, which had helped enact more than 190 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abuse.

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