Activists Call on Psychiatry to Take Stand

May 2009 Activists Call on Psychiatry to Take Stand

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Francisco, CA - May 14, 2009 - The American Psychiatric Association (APA) will begin its annual meeting this weekend in San Francisco. The Scientology cult and its various front groups, along with their bizarre "Industry of Death" sideshow, have promised to make the scene, warning the world about the kill-crazy, lobotomy-happy "psychs," and recruiting new customers for the cult. But also in attendance on the City's streets and sidewalks will be plenty of members of the "Anonymous" anti-Scientology activist network. Anonymous will be there as truth-tellers, to counter Scientology's insane and dangerous ravings about the mental health profession, and to expose the cult for what it is: a multi-national criminal organization, set up with numerous do-gooder front groups, all working exclusively toward one openly-declared goal: the "global obliteration of psychiatry."

When Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard published his book "Dianetics" in 1950, it did indeed become a best-seller of pop psychology for the layperson, as cult members ceaselessly claim. Although many psychiatrists, psychologists and other scientists wrote book reviews and op-ed pieces, pointing out the book's countless absurd and demonstrably false assertions, it maintained a certain popularity among a fair number of people who didn't know any better. Over the next few decades, as Scientology spread around the world, and fought it out with courts on issues ranging from practicing medicine without a license to burglary to kidnapping, it became easy for ordinary people to dismiss the cult as just a bunch of weirdos to whom various celebrities were inexplicably drawn.

But Scientology is much more than that. It is a meticulously crafted web of seemingly-benign false fronts and confusing financial flows. Scientology's many front groups include the Citizens' Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), Criminon, Narconon, and Applied Scholastics, and lots of others. The cult claims to be the "world's fastest growing religion," with anywhere from 8-15 million members, but mainstream demographic surveys and censuses have shown that the number of active members is closer to 55,000 worldwide, and declining. Scientology is currently under investigation and being prosecuted in several countries for a variety of human rights abuses and financial crimes. The cult has already been kicked out of Greece; in Germany it has been declared a "threat to democracy"; in France it is openly described in the media as a criminal gang; it is on very thin ice as well in Belgium, Norway, and other European countries.

In the United States, however, Scientology is mostly getting a free ride, due to the "religion" status it strong-armed from the Internal Revenue Service in 1993, and due to the efforts of a few celebrity and media shills. Also, especially in the past few years, Scientology has become quite adept in creating slick public relations materials that present the cult and its front groups as helpful members of civil society. They are most assuredly not helpful members of civil society. Scientology's frequent use of the term "human rights" is just their euphemism for "obliterating psychiatry."

Since the beginning of 2008, much has changed in the way the world and the general public view the Scientology cult. The Anonymous peaceful protests and demonstrations have shone a spotlight on Scientology's bizarre and illegal practices. People no longer see Scientology as merely a weird and harmless cult. People have begun to understand Scientology's "disconnection" policy, through which families are destroyed; people now know about the cult's internal prison gulag called the "Rehabilitation Project Force"; people now know about Scientology's "Fair Game" policy revenge policy against critics; people now know of the cult's tough coercion of female staff members to have abortions; people know about the cult's abusive treatment of children; about its phony "religious worker visa" game to circumvent immigration laws; people now know that Scientology really is what Time Magazine declared it to be in 1991: The Cult of Greed and Power.

Now, why should all this be particularly relevant to the interests of psychiatrists? As the "object" of the Scientology cult's vicious and delusional animus, psychiatrists need to take a larger role in helping to expose the cult, and in taking legal and political measures to stop its lying and criminality. Perhaps, like many people who haven't looked deeply into the issue, psychiatrists may generally believe that Scientology is annoying and stupid but mostly harmless. The fact is, however, that Scientology is annoying and stupid and dangerous. It is dangerous and harmful not only to its members and to the humane basis of society, but to psychiatrists personally and as a profession.

Scientology's war on psychiatry has taken an ominous turn in recent years, as major public Scientology events feature images of hand grenades and machine guns destroying representations of "Psychiatry," and Scientology front groups create online databases of libelous material about thousands of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. Although Anonymous and the "Old Guard" of critics are fighting Scientology for all the reasons it deserves to be fought, one thing they are also doing, in a sense, is fighting psychiatry's battle. Yet hardly a public word of encouragement comes from psychiatry, much less is an active role taken in their own defense. There is still plenty of work to do. It is time for psychiatrists and psychologists to speak up again in op-ed columns, to contact legislators, to file civil suits against the cult for libel and defamation, and generally to help with the efforts to hold Scientology and its leaders accountable for their actions.

Why is Scientology so mad at psychiatry?

According to the cult, psychiatrists are to blame for the African slave trade, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the September 11 attacks, and virtually every bad thing that has ever happened in human history. Scientologists believe that "psychiatric rape" occurs at epidemic levels in the USA, and that 25-30% of psychiatrists rape their patients. They believe that psychiatrists use electroshock therapy and drugs to keep their victims quiet. Scientologists believe that electroshock therapy and lobotomy are very common, always involuntary procedures, performed exactly as they were done in the 1950s, and with the same effects. Scientologists believe that psychiatrists intentionally "network" sex offenders, specifically so they can learn from each other and do crimes together.

Beyond psychiatry's evil deeds on this planet, L. Ron Hubbard explained some other things about the vicious shrinks.

According to high-level Scientology doctrine, not available to Scientologists until they have paid as much as USD $300,000, it started with some trouble 75 million years ago, in another part of the galaxy. The place suffered from extreme overpopulation. A guy named Xenu got the help of psychiatrists in summoning the galaxy's inhabitants for an income tax inspection. Then each person was injected in the neck with a mixture of alcohol and glycol, frozen, and put inside space-planes that looked very much like the DC-8 airliner that was popular in the 1960s. These space-planes flew to Earth (then known as "Teegeeack"), where the beings were stacked inside several volcanoes around the planet. Then Xenu dropped some massively large hydrogen bombs on top of them and blew them into smithereens — but smithereens that turned into parasitic ghosts. After a bunch of other crazy shenanigans involving movie theatres, implanted memories, a train, a circus, a gorilla, etc. etc. etc., these parasitic ghosts, or "bo

Later in space history, psychiatrists of the Marcab Confederacy, planets around a star in the "handle" of the "Big Dipper" constellation, imposed income tax as a punishment, not as a tax. The Psychiatrists came to earth 8,200 years ago with the 5th Invader Force, and began their reign of terror.

Quotes about psychiatry from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard:

A psychiatrist today has the power to (1) take a fancy to a woman (2) lead her to take wild treatment as a joke (3) drug and shock her to temporary insanity (4) incarnate [sic] her (5) use her sexually (6) sterilise her to prevent conception (7) kill her by a brain operation to prevent disclosure. And all with no fear of reprisal. Yet it is rape and murder. We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one. This is Project Psychiatry. We will remove them. - Hubbard, Sec ED, Office of LRH, Confidential, 22 February 1966, "Project Psychiatry"

Setting himself up as a terror symbol, the psychiatrist kidnaps, tortures and murders without any slightest police interference or action by western security forces. [...] A psychiatrist kills a young girl for sexual kicks, murders a dozen patients with an ice pick, castrates a hundred men. And they give him another million appropriation. [...] Crimes of extortion, mayhem and murder are done daily by these men in the name of "practice" and "treatment." There is not one institutional psychiatrist alive who, by ordinary criminal law, could not be arraigned and convicted of extortion, mayhem and murder. Our files are full of evidence on them. - L. Ron Hubbard in "Freedom" Scientology magazine, 1969.

Leipzig University's school of psychology and psychiatry opened the door to death camps in Hitler's Germany. Using drugs these men apparently gave Hitler to the world as their puppet. They tortured, maimed and slaughtered over 12,000,000 Germans in death camps. At the end of World War II these extremists formed the "World Federation of Mental Health," which enlisted the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association and established "National Associations for Mental Health" over the world, cowed news media, smashed any new technology and became the sole advisors to the US government on "mental health, education and welfare" and the appointers of all Health Ministers through [sic] the civilized world and through their graduate, Pavlov, dominated Russian Communist "mental health." This source is so wrong that it is destroying Man, having already destroyed scores of millions. - L. Ron Hubbard, HCO PL 26 Nov 1970

http://www.whyweprotest.net

ENDS

© Scoop Media