Found at:

http://www.slweekly.com/editorial/2005/politics_2005-06-16.cfm

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Shrink Rap

Adamant enemies of psychiatry, Utah Scientologists have won the ears of some state lawmakers.

by Katharine Biele

Lora Mengucci was just a child, but she remembers vividly those first encounters with the mental-health community. It was that community that would rip apart a family she knew and cared about.

Mengucci was too young to understand what was happening, but her older friends explained. Their father had sexually abused them. Their mother, desperate for help, confided to a Catholic priest, who recommended family counseling. Inexplicably, the counselor accused the woman of turning her children against their father.

"She begged for help, but she was diagnosed with a 'nervous breakdown,'" says Mengucci, fingering quote marks around the phrase.

Thus began a course of shock treatment, drugs and mental institutions for the woman, who returned to the family years later as a hollow shell. And that impression of emptiness stayed with Mengucci.

In 1976, Mengucci moved to Utah to work in a ski resort. Walking down a Salt Lake City street one day, she ran into someone professing Dianetics as a path to truth. Skeptical, she investigated. Today, Mengucci is the primary spokeswoman in Utah for her religion, Scientology.

Based on the writings and teachings of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology has become a major force in a political drama being played out in Utah and other states.

"The Church of Scientology has taken upon itself the goal of eradicating psychiatry from the face of the earth," writes Jeff Jacobsen, a critic who has worked for the Lisa McPherson Trust, a group that tried to expose the alleged dangers of Scientology.

The dangers seem real enough to Columbia University, whose TeenScreen program recently began mustering forces to counter Scientology-influenced legislation. TeenScreen is designed to give parents the "opportunity for their teens to receive a voluntary mental-health check-up," its literature says. Linked to The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health to combat depression and suicide, TeenScreen has come to represent all that is fearful about psychiatry to Scientologists, who foresee mandated drugging of the masses.

"By our creed, we believe that man is basically a spirit and that man's ultimate salvation lies in the spiritual realm," says Mengucci. "Psychiatry teaches that man is an animal and its practices reduce man to nothing more than an animal, a stimulus-response creature monitored strictly by chemicals and genes."

Mental-health professionals believe some spirits need help. To that end, TeenScreen invited Jan Ferre, a local activist with the Utah Coalition for People with Disabilities, to join a nationwide movement to take up academic arms in the battle.

"The focus was on the opposition to mental health screening, services and treatment," says Ferre, who joined the discussion group in Washington, D.C. "The mental health community. . . wants to educate the public that millions of illnesses of the brain are diagnosable and treatable and often need medication. We see a need for this in Utah and at a national level, and we want to provide accurate information."

Mengucci takes to chiding maternally. Scientology, she says, is not political. "We are for human rights; we are totally for individuals to live a life without people labeling them as insane."

In trying to distinguish religion and politics, the church in 1969 established the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to take its message to lawmakers. It has had mixed but notable results in Utah since at least 1999, when it began by opposing insurance parity for mental health. It came out in force in 2003, opposing the use of Ritalin in children and claiming rampant misdiagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

"We have been investigating and exposing human-rights abuses since the inception of the religion and the greatest single source of abuses we have found comes directly from the field of psychiatry," Mengucci says.

Former Rep. Katherine Bryson, R-Orem, took up the banner of parental rights in sponsoring a 2003 bill to prohibit schools from mandating the use of Ritalin in some instances. "The movement took a stronger child-welfare focus with the Parker Jensen case," says Ferre, referring to the backlash of bills after the boy's parents were ordered to send him for cancer treatment.

Because of the anti-drug connection, CCRH has been able to form strong alliances with Christian right groups, including the Eagle Forum, and has begun taking on the institutions of public education. Special education is a favorite focus.

Mengucci points to statistics from the State Board of Education that show funding to special ed cases increasing from $86 million to $97 million for the period 1995-99. She thinks the increase is bogus, and motivated by the call of federal dollars.

Take Outcome-Based-Education, for instance. An education-reform philosophy to increase literacy, OBE has become the whipping boy of the far right because it increases bureaucratic control and tries to shape student behavior. In a state where the dominant religion reveres the concept of free will, you can see why OBE looks ominous.

While Scientologists are not Christians, they have forged ties through their mutual interests. Mengucci ticks off their priorities: more parental rights, limited government, individual rights. Public education, she says, is destroying itself. Standardized Achievement Tests, for instance, have plummeted since the implementation of psychiatric and psychological programs in 1963.

In fact, there is no dearth of bad consequences from psychiatry, in the eyes of Scientologists. Hubbard went so far as to blame the Holocaust on psychiatry. In their "bid for total power," psychiatrists "employ terrorism, corruption and blackmail to cow political henchmen," Hubbard says in his 1997 article, "The Planned Revolution."

"Psychiatry is becoming the government's religion or the religion for the humanists, and we are actually fighting for religious freedoms," Mengucci says.

In fact, they are fighting a propaganda battle in which both sides are going mental. Small revolutions are indeed being planned to counter the outcry, and TeenScreen is only one. Its Website now has a host of links devoted to dispelling CCHR claims of mandated mental-health screening. "We'll keep our eye out for stuff," says Ferre. "Hopefully, our positive education plan will be helpful."

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