But psychiatry had set its sights beyond the asylum walls, and by the end of WW II, its lobbyists were busy promoting a world with psychiatrists on every hand, guiding leaders toward some Brave New World².

It was John Rawling Rees of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) who laid the groundwork for that post-war expansion of psychiatry. During an October 1940 speech to the British Mental Hygiene Association, entitled Strategic Planning for Mental Health, he described psychiatry’s progress in subverting society: “(W)e have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church; the two most difficult are law and medicine.... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians³ and organise some kind of fifth column⁴ activity!”

As psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the WFMH, described it in 1945: “...If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility”. Tragically, their words presaged sixdecades of destructive psychiatric influence that has wound its way through our schools, courts and all facets of society, leaving in its wake escalating suicide rates, a failed education system, increasing crime and violence, and an ever-widening drug culture.

And for the last three decades, CCHR has worked to document and expose those abuses, and to restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental healing.