Citizens Commission on Human Rights Exposes Psychiatry's Role in Oppressing Black South Africans
ZITHOBENI, South Africa, July 1, 2025 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Hundreds of South Africans visited the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death exhibit at the Zithobeni Community Hall, where they were introduced to the destructive legacy of psychiatry and its ongoing impact on Black communities. Hosted by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the exhibit, with the theme Taking Mental Wellness and Human Rights to Communities, resonated deeply with residents, traditional leaders and professionals.
The exhibit highlighted the insidious link between psychiatry's creation and support of eugenics and apartheid. South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd—a psychologist educated in Nazi Germany—applied racist psychiatric theories to craft apartheid policies. Psychiatrists supported the regime with pseudoscientific claims of Black inferiority, helping to justify widespread discrimination, denial of education, and the destruction of families, communities and entire cultures.
For decades, Black South Africans were funneled into psychiatric institutions through secret government contracts that guaranteed high occupancy rates. Tens of thousands were committed without consent, drugged, subjected to electroshock without anesthesia and forced into unpaid labor—practices exposed by CCHR in the 1970s. When local laws tried to silence CCHR's exposure of these abuses, CCHR took their findings to the World Health Organization (WHO). A 1983 WHO report compared the psychiatric labor camps to slavery and confirmed widespread neglect, abuse and preventable deaths.
The Zithobeni exhibit brought this history to light for many for the first time. 'My eyes are opened now after seeing the exhibit,'said one attendee.'Psychiatrists must be punished and expelled from health centers,' said another. The event shifted public opinion, with a majority of attendees leaving with a changed view of psychiatry—the raw, shocking facts now clearly etched in their minds.
Speakers at the event urged the community to reject psychiatric coercion and flagrant abuses and instead embrace wellness, dignity and informed choice. One respected community leader warned, 'Many people today seek quick fixes, often turning to psychiatric medications with potentially serious side effects. These medications can have a profound impact on our minds and bodies.' Another reminded the audience that '[eugenics']' racist and discriminatory ideas undoubtedly contributed to the intellectual climate that allowed apartheid to flourish.' Others emphasized that the ideologies that underpinned apartheid have not disappeared—they've simply been repackaged.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz, continues to fight for a mental health system rooted in dignity, freedom and informed choice. The organization has been instrumental in exposing abuses globally and, in South Africa, remains committed to ensuring communities know their rights and the full truth about psychiatry's role in their oppression. https://www.cchr.org/
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PHOTO CAPTION: Attendees learned the raw and shocking facts about psychiatry and its role in the creation and support of apartheid.
NEWS SOURCE: Citizens Commission on Human Rights
Keywords: Africa Business, CCHR, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death exhibit, psychiatry's role in apartheid, Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Black South Africans, ZITHOBENI, South Africa
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Associated Press
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News24
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News24
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The first cases I saw were returning political exiles,' says Venter, who experienced an internal snap after an incident in a Yeoville restaurant. 'It was 1995. Rocky Street was still quite eclectic and happening, and I was hanging out in a restaurant run by this Caribbean guy I knew. He had booted out a young drug addict, who went across the street and bought a knife, came back and stabbed him in the heart. It was 10am. I tried to resuscitate him, but I had nothing. He bled to death in front of me, and I was like, f*ck South Africa and its trauma and violence.' Venter boarded a plane for the United Kingdom, and a hospital job he found 'terminally boring'. By 1997, he was back in Johannesburg, specialising in internal medicine. The HIV epidemic was at its zenith, and hospitals across the country were overwhelmed. 'In some of the hospitals, like Bara (Baragwanath Hospital), you just left patients in casualty, and they would die there and go out the door. 'In Joburg Gen (Johannesburg General Hospital, today Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital), you put them on the floor in the corridors, and they died there waiting for a bed. It was brutal,' says Venter. 'The numbers had surged with a suddenness and severity that we still don't really understand. Nelson Mandela was trying to prevent a race war. There really wasn't much that he, or anybody else, could have done. I didn't understand the transmission enough, and we didn't have the tools to prevent it.' Toxic - and incredibly effective On completion of his specialist time ,Venter was burnt out and unsure of what to do with his life. He was interested in HIV, sparked by his experience of looking after a haemophiliac in 1997. 'The patient was one of a group that had HIV after receiving infected blood imported from the US by the state in the 1980s. 'The apartheid government took a decision to pay for their treatment with what was then extremely expensive antiretroviral therapy (ART), and the ANC government continued this,' says Venter, who was amazed at the impact of the drugs on his patient. 'I saw this patient in ICU just come off a ventilator, which just did not happen in those days.' Venter was offered a job with the Wits-based Clinical HIV Research Unit by world-renowned HIV expert Ian Sanne, who, says Venter, 'taught me how to do clinical trials, how to play with these toxic, incredibly effective drugs, and it was really the first time I was able to start seeing myself as someone who was going to get involved in HIV. The drugs have evolved since then, now more effective with almost no side effects.' It was also where Venter started interacting with the NGOs and activists then taking the fight for affordable antiretroviral therapies to the government. The Treatment Action Campaign had started smuggling them into the country. 'It was devastating, though, watching them fighting our government to even acknowledge HIV existed, while their members died needing those drugs. The hypocrisy of senior political figures, many of whom had family members on ARVs (antiretrovirals) I was treating, yet didn't call out Mbeki, is unforgivable.' He then joined Professor Helen Rees' Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Initiative and began working out of Esselen Street Clinic, an old Hillbrow facility home to the first South African HIV testing site, and from where he ran a huge US government-funded HIV support programme for the next decade across several provinces, gaining experience in expanding primary care approaches in chronic diseases. Sponsored by Since those heady Esselen days, many important clinical trials, HIV programmes, research papers and court cases have gone under the bridge, and Venter has become part of the moral conscience of South Africa. For years, Ezintsha was based in a Yeoville house and Hillbrow back rooms, around which sewage spills split and foamed. Now, it occupies two floors of a large office block in Parktown, an environment of biometric access controls and curvilinear glass, employing 150 people. On the upper floor is the Sleep Clinic, where patients with suspected sleep disorders lie back on R50 000 mattresses sponsored by the company. READ | Struggling with a sleep disorder? First-of-its-kind sleep clinic launched in Johannesburg 'The quid pro quo is that they be allowed to advertise,' says a faintly apologetic Venter. The Sleep Clinic also houses a new obesity clinic, where Venter sees patients with South Africa's new pandemic. 'The new drugs for obesity are every bit as revolutionary as the HIV drugs,' he says, 'but every bit as fiddly as antiretrovirals were in 2000'. New studies, using these wonder drugs in people with both HIV and obesity, are being hatched here to try to improve primary care for diabetes, hypertension and other common diseases in South Africa. The race to the bottom The transit away from the streets into cushy offices is one that many organisations working on HIV have made in recent years. 'It is nice not to have to worry about staff being pistol-whipped while at work,' remarks Venter, but donor funding, while key to the fight against HIV in South Africa, has also distanced organisations from communities, and created a dependency which, following the collapse of the US government's Aids fund, Pepfar, and the United States International Agency for International Development, USAID, threatens catastrophe. READ | How the health department will deal with Pepfar's near collapse 'What happened still feels quite unthinkable. It is extremely frustrating that our systems have not been made sustainable and are now on the brink of collapse as a result of Pepfar having been interwoven with the national HIV programme to such an extent everything unravels when it is stopped.' Venter sketches a scenario, in which South Africa's HIV response – 'the one effective programme we have' – is misleadingly characterised as 'too expensive', and dragged down to the lowest common denominator, 'leading to the same terrible outcomes you find in crap programmes, like diabetes'. 'A race to the bottom, in other words,' says Venter. 'We have poor indicators for almost every health metric outside of HIV, TB and vaccines, and even those are now slipping, due to the health department dropping the ball. 'Both our public and private health services are an expensive mess, for very different reasons. The health minister has been in charge for most of the last 17 years, we have endless excellent white papers and policy documents that gather dust, and little to show for the continent's most expensive health system.' Will this grim scenario prevail, or will South African healthcare be shepherded through the labyrinth of budget cuts and misfiring systems? Venter doesn't see why not. Venter says: Our problems are systemic, and we have enough resources and brains to fix them. He pauses to mull the judiciousness of his next point. 'I'll tell you what you do. You take the top people from the medical aids and tell them: You can't be head of Discovery or the Government Employee Medical Scheme, Gems, anymore, lead with the best people from academia, from government, the private sector, donors, civil society, form a focused group with teeth, and run the health system. 'We all declare our interests, put an end to corruption, and everyone from the president and the minister of health down in government must use the public healthcare system when using their medical aid. If they experience the system first-hand, they will have an immediate investment in assisting those fixing it. 'Start using the innovations South Africans are world leaders in, including data systems. If we do that, I am telling you we will fix the system in five years.' Venter, clearly, has already rolled up his sleeves for this new fight. It will be interesting to see who joins him.
