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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The controversial church, whose founder called shrinks "terrorists" and which labels mental illness a fraud, is closer than you think to implanting its extreme beliefs in the nation's laws and schools.
Jul 1, 2005 | It may be easy to dismiss Tom Cruise's recent outbursts against psychiatry as the ravings of an egomaniacal celebrity. Comedians have certainly had a field day with Cruise, a fervent disciple of the Church of Scientology, ever since he scolded Brooke Shields for taking prescribed medication to treat her postpartum depression and lectured Matt Lauer, host of the "Today" show, that psychiatry was a "pseudoscience" and antidepressant drugs were worthless because there is "no such thing as a chemical imbalance." "No?" wisecracked Lewis Black on "The Daily Show," watching a video clip of Cruise berating Lauer, "Then what do you call what's happening to you right now?"
But the Church of Scientology's war on psychiatry is no joke. For decades, Scientologists have maintained that the very notion of mental illness is a fraud. They base this belief on the views of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who proclaimed that psychiatry was an evil enterprise, a form of terrorism, and the cause of crime. Now, they're attempting to enshrine their contempt for psychiatry in laws across the country.
Recently, Scientologists have promoted legislation in Florida, Utah and New Hampshire that seeks to discredit psychiatry and drug therapies, especially for kids. The laws would penalize, even criminalize, schoolteachers who recommended mental health treatments to students or parents. At the same time, Scientologists have infiltrated the public schools, promoting a drug abuse program that presents information -- that drugs like marijuana and LSD, for instance, accumulate in body fat and create constant cravings -- roundly dismissed by medical experts.
In fact, physicians, psychiatrists and scientists have consistently said that Scientology's approaches to mental health have no basis in medical fact and can be dangerous to people who may need treatment. On June 27, following Cruise's "Today" show appearance, the American Psychiatric Association issued a statement to remind the nation's TV viewers that "science has proven that mental illnesses are real medical conditions" and that medications have been a lifesaving part of treatment plans for millions of people. "It is irresponsible for Mr. Cruise to use his movie publicity tour to promote his own ideological views and deter people with mental illness from getting the care they need," said Steven S. Sharfstein, president of the association. Scientology critics and former members of the church add that what lies behind the attacks on psychiatry and medicine is the church's drive to spread its religious teachings.
The Church of Scientology's world war on psychiatry arose from its zealous founder. For reasons known only to Hubbard himself, the science fiction author and budding church leader conceived a violent hatred of psychiatry. Perhaps his animus took root when the American Psychological Association, following the 1950 publication of Hubbard's self-help treatise, "Dianetics," advised its members against using Hubbard's psychological techniques with their patients.
In a 1969 article, "Today's Terrorism," published in a Scientology journal, Hubbard claimed that "the psychiatrist and his front groups operate straight out of the terrorist textbooks. The Mafia looks like a convention of Sunday school teachers compared to these terrorist groups." The psychiatrist, Hubbard went on, "kidnaps, tortures and murders without any slightest police interference or action by western security forces." Later, Hubbard wrote that, in society, "there's only one remedy for crime -- get rid of the psychs! They are causing it!"
Today, the Church of Scientology holds tax-exempt status in the United States, preventing it from doing any major political lobbying. Yet Scientologists remain active in politics and the public arena through front groups of their own. In the same year that Hubbard's "Today's Terrorism" article was published, Scientologists founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an organization designed to "investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights," according to its Web site, which claims: "No mental 'diseases' have ever been proven to medically exist." An exhibit on permanent display in the organization's Los Angeles headquarters, "Psychiatry Kills," links psychiatry to Nazism, apartheid and school violence. The shooting spree at Columbine High School is blamed in part on "anger management" classes that shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris allegedly attended.
While emphasizing that the CCHR is a "secular commission," David Figueroa, president of the group's Florida chapter and a practicing Scientologist, states that mental illness, as defined by the psychiatric community, does not exist. For instance, he says, bucking the world's medical textbooks, "there is zero amount of proof that schizophrenia exists as a singular mental illness."
He takes particular offense at the mention of attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "Our contention from the very beginning is that these mental disorders are a scam," he says. "We know that there has never been any biological proof to any of these so-called mental illnesses these kids have been tagged with, whether it's ADD or ADHD. They don't exist. It's 100 percent fraud."
Many of the symptoms that kids exhibit in the classroom, Figueroa argues, may just be signs of academic, emotional or nutritional problems - difficulty understanding a lesson, parents who are getting divorced, an allergic reaction to a food such as peanuts or strawberries. In those cases, he suggests, a child needs only tutoring or vitamins. But he's convinced that psychiatrists don't recognize those possibilities; they just drug the child into submission, like a kiddy version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." "Their only tool is to label and to drug," Figueroa says. "That's all they know how to do."
Advocates of the psychiatric care of kids say that's preposterous. "Appropriate treatment is not always medication," says Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the National Child and Adolescent Action Center for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Referring to Scientology organizations like CCHR, she says, "These groups make a leap of faith that we're going to identify kids and put them on drugs. That is their attempt to sensationalize this issue to recruit other individuals and groups."
Medical experts also dismiss the claim that ADHD is a fraudulent condition. "It is a bona fide condition recognized and diagnosed around the world," writes Dr. Peter S. Jensen, director of the Center for the Advancement of Children's Mental Health at Columbia University, in NAMI Beginnings magazine in 2003. Jensen cites biological evidence for the condition and points out that hundreds of studies have shown that medical treatment of ADHD is effective. His article was in part a response to hearings on Capitol Hill about ADHD, which, he notes, had been organized with "substantial Scientology input." "Children and families suffering with the burdens of ADHD must no longer be held hostage to myth and misinformation," he writes.
The argument that children are overmedicated, critics say, constitutes a fig leaf concealing the Scientologists' more radical agenda: destroying psychiatry. "Scientologists have gotten behind an attitude that's out there in general society that too many kids are on medication," says Jim Daughton, a lobbyist for the Florida Psychiatric Society. "Legislators and policymakers have that general concern. Nobody wants to have these kids hopped up on medication if they don't need to be. So Scientologists are able to get on that bandwagon and take it a step further, saying there's no test for mental illness, that mental illness doesn't exist."
