If you are unfamiliar with this newsgroup, you will occasionally see large blocks of postings telling apocryphal horror stories concerning the mental health field. These are placed by proponents of the Scientology business, which deals in quack therapy procedures such as "auditing", invented by an non-degreed pulp science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, who, according to those living with him at the time, concocted the basic text of his therapy with no research, simply rewriting a hodgepodge of sources including Freud, into a pop self-help book. The main reason customers of the Scientology business can often be found spreading misleading information regarding the mental health profession is that Mr. Hubbard's work was rightfully discredited from the beginning. Mr. Hubbard, in fact, is on record as having begged for psychiatric help in the hospital after his less-than-impressive wartime career. Ultimately, it's the rather ambitious hope of the Scientology business to somehow replace the mental health field, leaving themselves in the lucrative spot of only resort. Towards this quixotic goal, their customers and sales agents will, from time to time, make massive postings of highly questionable anecdotes wherein people go insane from Ritalin and set the house on fire, or a psychiatrist is supposedly operating a bordello of underage kidnapped patients- well, you get the idea; it's just a variation on the anti-semetic blood libel stories where Jews supposedly sacrificed kidnapped Christian babies at passover. In fact, the specific targeting of a profession as psychiatry, with a large number people of Jewish background, tends to give this particular brand of blood libel a rather troubling undertone; while there's an absence of anti-semetic themes in Hubbard's writings, his recorded negative views concerning Blacks and Asians would certainly make one think. NTH.

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