Exposing Psychiatry in South Africa - Scientology Effective Solutions

Psychiatry in
South Africa

In the 1970s, Scientologists uncovered and exposed shocking conditions in South African private psychiatric camps, where tens of thousands of blacks were used as slave labour, often dying of untreated physical conditions. Evidence presented to the United Nations led to World Health Organisation (WHO) investigations in 1977.

WHO’s 1983 report concluded that, “in no other medical field in South Africa, is the contempt of the person cultivated by racism more concisely portrayed than in psychiatry.”

After the fall of apartheid, CCHR presented further evidence to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission covering psychiatry’s racist ideology and how psychiatrists and psychologists systemically suppressed the rights of blacks. As a result, a charter of patients’ rights was created and steps were taken by the Psychological Society of South Africa to bar racist psychological tests.

By 1977, CCHR was onto the case. With hard evidence of six deaths related to the therapy, CCHR went public and the Church of Scientology’s investigative journal Freedom launched its decade-long coverage of Chelmsford. And while the exposure of these atrocities finally resulted in an international scandal and much-needed psychiatric reform, it took many years to see justice done. For the Chelmsford scandal posed a major problem for the psychiatric profession and they proceeded to bring their considerable influence to bear.

On January 6, 1981, Sir Martin Roth, Professor of Psychiatry at Cambridge University, wrote that the “Scientologists and other organisations will have obtained ammunition for years or decades to come. There is, therefore, a pressing need for maintaining strict confidentiality at this stage until one can set these barbarities in the context of contemporary practise in psychiatry in a carefully prepared statement that comes from colleges and other bodies concerned.”

And so, when the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists was given the evidence, it did nothing. In the early 1980s, the Minister of Health of the state of New South Wales, Kevin Stewart, was given the evidence, and he did nothing. Meanwhile, public relations attacks initiated by mental health organisations were mounted against CCHR.

Then the weight of evidence—mostly a result of CCHR’s 10-year battle for truth—began to tip the scale. Deep sleep therapy was banned, Chelmsford was closed down and Bailey took his own life, rather than face his accusers in court. And in 1988, the New South Wales government appointed a Royal Commission to look into deep sleep therapy and Chelmsford.

The Royal Commission’s subsequent December 1990 report triggered a thorough shake-up of mental health care in New South Wales. Many of the surviving victims who received electroshock therapy took their cases to the Victim’s Compensation Tribunal. The Tribunal found that deep sleep patients receiving electroshock had indeed suffered from “an act of violence,” and the victims were compensated. The Royal Commission’s recommendations led to the passage of a new patients’ bill of rights and the establishment of a Medical Complaints Commission in most states of Australia.