In Spain, Greece, Hungary, Britain and other European countries, Freedom‘s revelations have become major concerns of human rights advocates and civil libertarians, including psychiatry‘s abuse of citizens under the guise of “mental health.”

Since its inception, Freedom has exposed the inhumanity rampant in mental health systems and championed the civil rights of patients confined to psychiatric facilities. In its earliest editions, Freedom revealed atrocities within the walls of psychiatric institutions, past and present. From the tortures of the early years (whipping; flogging; the application of ants, scabies and stinging nettles; surgical removal or cauterising [burning] of the clitoris and excising women‘s ovaries; treatment of masturbation by circumcision and by cauterising the spine and genitals) to the 20th century alternatives (ice baths, straitjackets, lobotomies, electroshock, deadly psychiatric drugs and other horrors), psychiatry‘s treatments create far more harm than help.

In many European countries Freedom‘s revelations have become major concerns of civil libertarians.

ADVANCING REFORMS IN GREAT BRITAIN

Inhumane conditions at UK psychiatric hospitals have plagued the mental health care system for decades. In March of 1969, within months of Freedom‘s initial exposés of British psychiatric abuses, the National Health Service (NHS) conducted an emergency inquiry into Ely Hospital in Cardiff and reports of abused mental patients within its walls. The inquiry found extreme brutality at Ely, with patients routinely slapped and struck in the face and nurses stealing food meant for patients.

Electroshock: psychiatry‘s brain-damaging "therapy"

But as Freedom soon discovered, such abuse was by no means restricted to patient care at ground level; it was endemic among psychiatry‘s hierarchy, as well. Thus Freedom‘s 1970s exposés of heinous experiments at the hands of pre-eminent UK psychiatrists produced an immediate ripple effect internationally. That trend began when Freedom unearthed a notorious mind-control project conducted by psychiatrist William Sargant at St. Thomas‘s Hospital in London. At the black core of this “deep sleep” project was a drug-induced, long-term comatose state during which the unconscious subject was battered daily with up to 200 electric shocks—often without knowledge and consent. Sargant kept his unwitting victims heavily sedated in a “sleep room” for up to 40 days, Freedom discovered.

Independent researchers and other investigative news reports later confirmed Freedom‘s revelations that these secret experiments were funded by the intelligence community as part of the “MK-ULTRA” mind-control research program; the “treatments” were designed to, among other things, create “programmed assassins.”

Concurrently throughout the 1970s and 80s, Freedom also investigated reports of abuses in the United Kingdom‘s Brooke Hospital, finding atrocities committed as a matter of routine by consulting psychiatrist Paul Bridges, a chief advocate of brain operations at the Geoffrey Knight Psychosurgical Unit. Bridges commissioned on the order of 20 psychosurgery operations each year, even though leading UK medical experts deemed such procedures unethical.