Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a lobbying organization founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz,[a][2][3]: 170 [4]: 294  and incorporated in 1982.

[5] Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, its stated mission is to "eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health and enact patient and consumer protections.

[21] In 2003, CCHR presented a report with the title "The Silent Death of America's Children" to the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, with case histories of several dozen under-aged psychiatric patients who had died as a result of psychotropic drug treatment and restraint measures in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In its early years, CCHR claimed victory in a 1969 Pennsylvania case involving Victor Győry, a Hungarian refugee who had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in April 1969.

[27][30] CCHR would typically request a tour of a psychiatric hospital, issue a public report based on patient testimony and other sources, and then push for legal investigations and reform.

For a decade prior, CCHR had been pushing for an investigation of the Chelmsford Private Hospital in New South Wales, and its head, Dr. Harry Bailey, who had been practising DST from 1963 to 1979.

"[40] Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR and winner of an International Association of Scientologists Freedom Medal award, has been implicated in covering up the sexual abuse of an 11-year-old girl in the Australian branch of the church.

Every video, artifact, and display was an overblown attempt to show how the profession is to blame for the Holocaust, for destroying artists through barbaric "treatments," for hooking children on drugs, and much, much more.

I put together a team and approved the design and content of this extraordinary spectacle of over-the-top propaganda.Of the anti-psychiatry exhibit, Andrew Gumbel of Los Angeles City Beat stated "it is one thing to assert that psychiatry has had its abuses, quite another to say the profession in and of itself is evil ... this is the classic stuff of paranoid conspiracy theory".

Berenbaum stated that "I have known psychiatrists to be of enormous assistance to people deeply important to me in my life," and Caplan complained that he had been taped without being told what the film was about, and called the producers "smarmy and dishonest.

The Marketing of Madness is a documentary which alleges that the mental health industry is an unscientific field driven solely by the profit motive, to the detriment of patients.

Simplistic "chemical imbalance" explanations for mental disorders have never received empirical support; and most prominent psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and psychologists have not espoused such ill-defined, facile etiological theories.

[54] Unlike a shy individual, a person diagnosed with social anxiety disorder is likely to experience symptoms such as nausea, stammering, and panic attacks.