Psychiatry and Sanity

There’s an interesting museum in Los Angeles.  It’s not the Getty, or Museum of Neon Art.  It doesn’t sound like a museum, and maybe it’s not.  It’s not full of old stuff or relics.  It’s not pretty or shiny or in any way designed to make you envy people who once lived there.  It’s the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, and it’s full or stories of dominance and pain and oppression.

The CCHR is a ‘Watchdog Investigating & Exposing Psychiatric Human Rights Violations,’ and it’s the kind of information you only seek out if you can fathom history rather than reject it.  It’s the kind of information you see at a Holocaust Memorial, only it doesn’t start in Germany and end in Germany, or start in the 1930’s and end in 1945.  It is the whole history of classifying and oppressing people based on race; the history of eugenics and psychiatry, which are for more connected that we would like to think.

At some level this is personal for all of us.  We all oppress and we are all oppressed; we are all surrounded by the opportunity to make ourselves numb.  Because the CCHR provides information that is preferable to bury, to reject, to forget, that must not happen.  Information we would rather not know is information we should know.

You can probably find a CCHR near you … for free.