APA Faces Outrage: Child Deaths and a $329 Billion Mental Health Failure

Religious leaders across denominations are voicing fierce condemnation of what they describe as psychiatric atrocities condoned by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Faith-based organizations have decried the deaths of restrained children in psychiatric facilities as moral abominations, likening the systemic abuse to modern-day institutionalized cruelty.

As the American Psychiatric Association (APA) opened its annual meeting in Los Angeles over the weekend, hundreds of human rights advocates, civil rights leaders, clergy, medical professionals, and attorneys rallied outside the convention center, demanding an end to coercive psychiatric practices, particularly deadly restraints. Led by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog organization, the protest focused on lethal restraint deaths of children, widespread forced treatment, and the lack of accountability in a mental health system that received $329 billion in federal funding in 2022 alone.

Coinciding with the protest, CCHR opened its acclaimed traveling exhibit, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, located near the convention center at 408 W. 11th St., Downtown Los Angeles. Open daily through Thursday, May 22, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.  The exhibit documents psychiatry’s abusive history and current practices that have drawn condemnation from United Nations human rights bodies and the World Health Organization that have repeatedly called for an end to forced institutionalization and psychiatric treatment.

At the opening of the exhibit, Senior Pastor of Community Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, Rev. Oliver E. Buie, stated: “Today, we stand not only in protest, but in solemn remembrance across America, across the world, for children are being locked away, drugged and restrained in psychiatric facilities. Over a third experience seclusions or violent restraints, some never come home. Today, I read just a few names of children who should be alive, but have died from psychiatric restraint. Remember these names. Jimmy Kanda, age six. Jesseon Terry, seven. Jamal Odom, nine. Candace Newmaker, 10. Andrew McClain, 11. Clark Harmer, 12. Travis Parker, 13. Linda Harris, 14. Jeremiah Fleming, 15. And Cornelius Frederick, only 16 years of age. It’s hard to believe the destruction of those who should be alive today. I want us to let these names echo. Let them not be forgotten. Let them fuel justice.”

Some APA attendees toured the exhibit after witnessing the protest. Several expressed support, saying the display should be featured within future APA meetings.

In the U.S., more than half of psychiatric hospital admissions are involuntary. Over 37% of child and youth psychiatric inpatients are subjected to seclusion or restraints. Protest banners showed photos of children — some as young as 7 — killed by restraints, never returning home. Medical examiners ruled their deaths homicides, yet in only one case was there limited criminal accountability.

“This is not mental healthcare — it’s a $329 billion failure that tolerates homicide as therapy,” said Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International. “Children have died crying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Minimally, the APA should support a ban on such lethal practices.”

Mexico expert, Amalia Gamio, Vice Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, attended the exhibit opening and denounced global psychiatric coercion: “Involuntary medication, electroshock, even sterilization — these are inhuman practices. Under international law, they constitute torture. There is an urgent need to ban all coercive and non-consensual measures in psychiatric settings.”

The exhibit features a section on psychiatry’s role in systemic racism. Rev. Frederick Shaw, Jr., President of the NAACP Inglewood-South Bay Branch, condemned the disproportionate use of psychiatric coercion on African Americans: “More than 27% of Black youth—already impacted by racism—are pathologized with labels like ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder,’ which has no medical test or scientific validity. This mirrors how civil rights leaders were once labeled with ‘protest psychosis’ to justify drugging them with antipsychotics. Psychiatry didn’t just participate in suppressing Black voices—it orchestrated it. And they’re still doing it.”

Joseph J. Cecala, Jr., civil rights attorney and former U.S. Army captain, addressed the psychiatric drug crisis in the military: “Antidepressants, which carry increased suicide risks, make up two-thirds of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ psychiatric drug expenditures. Veterans account for nearly 13% of all adult suicides — over 6,000 lives lost each year.”

CCHR and its international network are calling for immediate accountability and legislative action to ban coercive psychiatric practices. “This is not care,” the group declared. “These are abuses. Forced treatment is torture passed off as mental health ‘care.’”

About CCHR

CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist, lecturer and author, Prof. Thomas Szasz and has led efforts worldwide to expose and bring to account psychiatric abuse, now echoed in UN and WHO calls to end abusive practices.