Beginning in the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, the UK CCHR chapter conducted numerous highly publicised investigations into reports of patient abuses at mental health institutions.

Through a campaign that included letter-writing and public demonstrations against the abuses, CCHR fought to revise the barbaric 1959 UK Mental Health law. Finally, a new Mental Health Act was passed in 1983. Included in it were measures for the establishment of a commission to enforce the act and its new protections of patient rights, such as consent procedures for abusive treatments like psychosurgery and ECT, and a Code of Practice to prevent psychiatrists from violating the rights of those in their care.

Such regulations remain a necessity, as shown, for example, by sexual deviance within the profession, with 30 British psychiatrists struck from the medical registry or receiving criminal convictions between 1990 and 2003. In one notable case, psychiatrist Paul Bridges—investigated by CCHR in the 1980s for conducting unethical psychosurgeries—was arrested along with 14 others after the Metropolitan Police’s Paedophile Unit uncovered a paedophile ring. Bridges was found guilty in August 2000 after admitting he had indecently assaulted two boys and had taken lewd photographs of the youngest child.

In Norway, members of CCHR exposed one of that nation’s most notorious hidden scandals: between 3,000 and 4,000 people admitted to Gaustad psychiatric facility between 1945 and 1970 had been brutally lobotomised. Psychosurgeons had destroyed healthy brain tissue, sawing open skulls and cutting into prefrontal lobes with long needles. CCHR’s findings spurred the formation of an investigative committee, headed by a Supreme Court judge, and through the collaborative efforts of patients’ rights activist Mary Lehne and others, the country’s 500 lobotomy survivors were awarded government compensation for the abuses they suffered.