Further digging by Freedom uncovered a network of privately owned, government-subsidised “mental institutions,” housing more than 11,000 blacks.

Exploited as a slave labour force by the private owners, the “mental patient” inmates lived under terrible conditions. Condemned to work in mines by their profit-minded masters, they were perpetually drugged and forced to sleep on mats on concrete floors in crowded dormitories, with lavatories that often consisted only of a trench in the middle of the room.

No medical facilities existed in the asylums, yet some inmates told of being taken to an outside institution and given electro-convulsive therapy, administered without anaesthetics—a brutal experience that can break bones, shatter vertebrae and cause death.

When the South African Freedom published reports exposing the brutality, the racist government reacted with fury, enacting measures that included a law making it a crime for news media to report on conditions in any psychiatric facility.

Refusing to be cowed by attempts to suppress the truth, Freedom took its information to the United Nations, which commissioned the World Health Organisation (WHO) to conduct its own probe. Its investigators concluded, “... the ’sanitaria‘ are in fact custodial institutions with very few discharges per year, and with poor standards of patient care....

[I]n a country which is amongst the richest in the world, the type and quality of mental health care are determined by the colour of the patient's skin.”

WHO compared the misery and exploitation in the camps to “the ownership and trading of slaves.”

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) dispatched an investigative team to South Africa, which found a “high number of needless deaths among black patients” in the camps. Charles Pinderhughes, a member of that team, noted that discrimination against blacks in the compounds was “massive and general.”

Pinderhughes commended the Church of Scientology and Freedom for bringing the camps to public attention.

Freedom continued its efforts to correct the abuses. Ultimately, a charter for the protection of patients’ rights in South Africa was created.

A decade after apartheid became history, appreciation for Freedom’s investigative reporting remains. “I think it is highly appropriate that I thank the Church of Scientology ... for exposing the most horrendous practices of the apartheid system of mental treatment of people,” said Dr. Ben Ngubane, South Africa’s Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology in November 2003. “The Church of Scientology became a real thorn in the side of the apartheid government. And, of course, it was for the better, for those who suffered from those conditions. So thank you very much.”