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SPEARHEADING SOCIAL REFORM
In Norway, members of CCHR exposed one of that country’s greatest hidden scandals by revealing that between 3,000 and 4,000 people admitted to Gaustad psychiatric facility between 1945 and 1970 had been brutally lobotomized. Surgeons destroyed living brain tissue by sawing open the crown of the skull and slashing away at the prefrontal lobes with a knitting needle. In Sweden, CCHR has regularly produced a quarterly magazine entitled Human Rights. Sent to politicians, social workers, police and other officials, it regularly exposes such crimes as the sexual exploitation of patients by psychiatrists.
In Spain, CCHR documented psychiatric abuses and called for investigations into instances of psychiatric brutality and violations of human rights. Patients incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals and forced to receive brain-damaging electroshock treatments have been freed from psychiatric hands. Through an ongoing public information campaign, CCHR has warned government officials and legislators of psychiatry’s role in creating violence, subverting education, preying on the elderly and sexually abusing patients.
Europe is, however, only the tip of the psychiatric iceberg. Exposing similar betrayals in the name of help in countries throughout the world has been the ongoing duty of other CCHR chapters.
 
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