British mind-control psychiatrist William Sargant

One of the reforms championed in these early UK issues of Freedom was a landmark Charter of Rights for Mental Patients to usher in a new era of reform in the field of mental healing. The then-chairperson of Britain‘s National Association of Mental Health, Mary Appleby, admitted that Freedom‘s work represented “one aspect of disillusionment with the official mental health line” that brought abuses to light and secured respect for human dignity and patients‘ rights through Britain‘s Mental Health Act.

Passed in 1983, the Act brought about positive reforms Freedom had championed in its first 15 years in print, including 1) Procedures for gaining consent for abusive treatments such as psychosurgery and ECT, 2) establishment of a Mental Health Act Commission to act as a watchdog to ensure the implementation of the Act, and 3) a Code of Practice to define proper psychiatric procedures and to safeguard the rights of psychiatric patients.

With the introduction of the Mental Health Act‘s tightened regulations, Freedom followed in 1984 with an investigation of the rate of brain operations conducted in the UK. The outcome was a dramatic reduction in the ensuing years. In fact, so prevalent were the declining referrals that the Geoffrey Knight Psychosurgical Unit closed its doors, bringing its grisly, pseudo-scientific “treatments” to an end in the process.

Such milestones, however, come only with constant vigilance. Soon after the Mental Health Act‘s passage, Freedom discovered attempts by the Royal College of Psychiatry (RCP) to thwart implementation of the Act‘s code of procedures. In 1986, Freedom reported that the block to application was RCP President Dr. Thomas Bewley, consultant psychiatrist for the infamous Tooting Bec Hospital in South London. As Freedom discovered, Bewley‘s institution was described in the Health Advisory Service (HAS) report at the time as “reminiscent of the asylum of 30 years ago.” HAS went so far as to recommend closure of the hospital‘s psychiatric facility, which eventually came to pass in July 1995.

The step-up in psychiatric drugging in society over the two decades since the Mental Health Act‘s passage has meant a sharpened Freedom focus on the abuse of both psychiatric prescription drugs and street drugs. In recent years, such reports have led to public outrage over permissive “drug education” programmes delivered in British schools. In 2001, for example, when Britain‘s youth claimed the highest rate of drug and alcohol abuse in Europe, a Freedom exposé on the content of drug education in the nation generated much outcry amongst parent-teacher groups, the media and government. Far from preventing drug abuse, some publicly funded lectures and publications promote how to “safely” take drugs, teaching students how to successfully roll their own joints and how to “deal with your parents when they find out you are taking drugs,” among other lessons.

And Freedom‘s decades-long coverage of the death and destruction caused by psychiatric drugs in Great Britain has contributed as well to that government‘s landmark initiatives to protect children from the otherwise hidden drug scourge. In 2003, for instance, Britain banned certain “antidepressant” drugs for those under 18 because of the risk of suicide—effects Freedom began investigating and bringing to readers‘ attention some two decades earlier.

Attributed largely to the UK Freedom‘s seminal exposés of electroshock, that practice has likewise seen a fall into professional disfavour—so much so that, in May 2003, a British psychotherapist took an historic stand against ECT‘s dangers and lack of scientific foundation. Writing in The Guardian, he conceded that, despite a “dearth of research supporting the use of ECT,” British psychiatrists have long subjected patients to this “outmoded” psychiatric method.