This spring in Florida, where the Clearwater area is a Church of Scientology stronghold, CCHR mounted an aggressive political campaign to keep kids from getting psychiatric care. In the state Legislature, two CCHR-sponsored bills were backed by two Republicans, Rep. Gustavo Barreiro, of Miami Beach, and Sen. Victor Crist, of Tampa. Indeed, as Barreiro told the St. Petersburg Times, Scientologists had even written parts of the legislation. Both Barriero and Crist had been friendly with the church: They were guest speakers at a Scientology celebration where Crist touted the legislation and Barriero gave the church an award for volunteer work following the 2004 hurricanes.

The legislation spurred heated battles in the Florida statehouse and put Scientologists and CCHR up against a host of medical and psychological organizations, including the Florida Medical Association, the Florida School Boards Association, the Florida Psychological Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the Florida Department of Health, the Florida Department of Children and Families, and the Florida School Psychologists Association. Scientologists Kelly Preston and Kirstie "Fat Actress" Alley testified in Tallahassee on behalf of their church. At one point, Alley wept so hard -- "This isn't an issue about psychiatrist vs. non, but about the children" -- that she could barely get the words out. "It's tough lobbying against movie stars," says Daughton of the Florida Psychiatric Society. "Some of it was just surreal."

On the serious side, the legislation places Scientologists in conflict with the U.S. Surgeon General, whose office released a report in 2001 stating that one in 10 children and adolescents in the United States suffers from mental illness, but fewer than one in five of these children gets treatment in any given year. Where the CCHR sees an epidemic of drugging kids that don't have real problems, the Surgeon General sees millions of kids whose real problems are going undiagnosed and untreated.

Florida House Bill 209 stipulated that teachers or other school personnel would not "initiate" a diagnosis related to any psychiatric disorder. Lawmakers feared that if a teacher was concerned about a child and then alerted parents, which led to a diagnosis, the teacher would be in violation of the law. "It was a chilling bill because it signaled to the teacher that don't you dare suggest that there may be a problem," says Jim McDonough, who runs the Florida Office of Drug Control, which is also responsible for suicide prevention in the state.

Figueroa from CCHR argues that suggesting that a child could have a problem is a smear itself. "It's a violation of their rights to even suggest that they go into the psychiatric industry, because they're suggesting that there is something mentally wrong with the child," he says.

The bill was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Jeb Bush.

The other bill, House Bill 909, dealt with how the foster care and juvenile justice systems handle kids' mental health issues -- a big topic since child psychiatrists maintain that many kids end up in the justice system because of undiagnosed mental illnesses. "Essentially, we're locking up kids that have mental disorders," says Gruttadaro of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. But this bill explicitly limited any treatment of such disorders by requiring a "non-psychiatric medical specialist" to evaluate children for "nutritional deficiencies, heavy-metal toxicity and hypoglycemia," among other possible causes of problems, before psychotropic medication could be prescribed.

"That's sort of like saying if you saw someone who appeared to be dying of a heart attack, you had to rule out everything else before you treated for a heart attack," says McDonough, who argued against the legislation. That bill also smeared psychiatrists by implying they're not medical doctors. "That bill makes a false division among medical practitioners," says Dr. Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta who has studied Scientology. "Psychiatrists are trained doctors. The bill implies that psychiatrists as medical practitioners can't be trusted." Although that's no surprise to Kent. "Believing that psychiatrists are cosmic devils is a part of the Scientologist doctrine," he says. The bill died in committee.

For his part, McDonough from the Florida Office of Drug Control was surprised by the Scientologists' political zeal. "In the beginning, I didn't realize that this was a concerted effort to actually get through an ideological leaning that had to do with church dogma, in this case, the Church of Scientology, which denies that mental illness exists as a problem, that it can be diagnosed and treated -- when medical science is very clear and very well established on the subject: It does exist, and it can be diagnosed, and it can be treated."

Although both bills failed, a version of one of them did make it into Florida law. In May 2005, Gov. Bush signed legislation that prohibits schools from forcing children to take psychotropic drugs as a condition of going to school. The law allows teachers and school personnel to share observations with the parents about a student's behavior and to suggest outside help. "However," the law reads, "a public school teacher and school district personnel may not compel or attempt to compel any specific actions by the parent or require that a student take medication."

While CCHR brazenly hailed this concession as a victory for itself, the rule that schools couldn't compel a child to take medication was already cemented in federal law. In fact, President Bush signed it into law just last December, as part of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, after much lobbying by the CCHR and its cadre of celebrities. "It's basically a statement that nobody disagrees with," says Daughton, the Florida Psychiatric Society lobbyist.

Florida, however, isn't the end of the story. In Utah, CCHR has been pushing anti-psychiatry bills in the Legislature for the past two years. "This last session, they succeeded in criminalizing schoolteachers who would suggest to parents that their child get a psychological assessment," says Dr. Curt Canning, a psychiatrist in Logan, Utah, who is a spokesperson for the Utah Psychiatric Association. That crime would have been a misdemeanor, Canning says. This March, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. vetoed the bill.

In New Hampshire, similar bills have sought to limit what teachers can and can't say about their perceptions of a child's mental health to parents, according to Michael Cohen, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in New Hampshire. "If you go around the country, you can see that the legislation is almost identical in every state," he says.

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