Scientology vs. Science

Psychiatry, says L. Ron Hubbard's "church", is responsible for Nazism, school shootings, and even 9/11

~ By ANDREW GUMBEL ~

Even before I start writing this column, and pretty much regardless of what I say, I know I am going to tick off the Scientologists. I know this because I have ticked them off already.

A few days ago, I visited their new anti-psychiatry museum in Hollywood, thinking, correctly, that it would offer an intriguing window into the thinking of a notoriously secretive organization. With a name like "Psychiatry: Industry of Death," the exhibit was not exactly going to be coy about its point of view.

About halfway through the lengthy parade of videos and visual displays =96 after I had been informed of psychiatry's long-standing "master plan" for world domination, after the lecture about Adolf Hitler's central role in making this plan a reality, but just before the display holding psychiatry to blame for the deaths of Ernest Hemingway, Del Shannon, Billie Holiday, Kurt Cobain, Spalding Gray, and just about every other entertainment celebrity who did not happen to die of strictly natural causes =96 a man in a gray shirt and matching tie approached me in the semi-darkness and asked me to step aside.

I recognized him from the reception desk on my way into the building. He'd welcomed the half-dozen or so people who started the tour with me and handed out our audio headsets. He had also given a slightly peculiar answer to a passerby who asked what the museum charged for admission. "It doesn't cost anything to get in," he had said with rather deliberate emphasis. To which I couldn't resist responding: "But getting out again is a whole different matter." I soon regretted making that crack.

"I saw you were taking notes," he said sternly. "Are you a reporter?" I told him I was, and gave him the name of the publication. That was fine, he said, but he would appreciate it if I had a word with the museum's publicist on my way out. The publicist, a thin, wiry woman called Marla Filidei, made a couple of subsequent sweeps through the exhibit herself. When my companion and I finally sat down with her in a conference room, she asked us what we had made of our experience.

Within a minute or two, it was clear she was not nearly as interested in our opinion of the way the exhibit was put together =96 which was how I chose to interpret her question =96 as she was in bombarding us with more talking points about the evils of psychiatry. I told her I wasn't a scientist and had no interest in getting into a detailed argument about the benefits or dangers of mood-altering drugs; on the other hand, she wasn't a scientist either, and the "Church" of Scientology had absolutely no standing to pronounce on medical issues. That clearly riled her, because by the time I got home there was an e-mail waiting in which she called our meeting "the most bizarre encounter I have had with a reporter in 10 years" and essentially berated me for refusing to engage in an argument she was clearly itching to have.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the recent outbursts of =FCber-Scientologist Tom Cruise =96 his trashing of Brooke Shields after she went public about her post-partum depression, or his set-to with Matt Lauer about Ritalin, in which he proclaimed himself an expert on the history of psychiatry and made almost as big a fool of himself as he had by jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. The crudeness of the anti-psychiatric argument is tinged with a distinct patina of paranoia. It's not enough for Scientologists to express their near-pathological hatred of psychiatry in all its forms; they also have to feel they are being persecuted for their beliefs.

The premise of the museum..................

(snip)

This nonsense might be funny if it weren't also so perniciously influential. The gala opening of the museum, just before Christmas, was a star-studded affair headlined by Anne Archer, Jenna Elfman, and much of the rest of Hollywood's Scientologist elite. The museum is a no-expense-spared, slick exercise in propaganda aimed at the widest possible audience. As the distinctly creepy recruitment slogan illuminated above the final video display had it: "You are safe as long as we are here."

In our increasingly anti-rational age, the Scientologists' assault on psychiatry takes its place alongside the anti-Darwin movement, the anti-global warming movement, and, indeed, the Bush White House's general disregard of established scientific fact. It needs to be denounced every bit as vigorously as the rest. My companion probably had it right when, as we left the museum, she paced up and down the street shouting: "I'm on Ritalin, and it changed my life!" The passers-by on Sunset were soon howling with laughter, the best possible corrective.

Andrew Gumbel is the author of Steal This Vote (Nation Books). 1-12-06

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Scientology vs. Science - Los Angeles CityBeat http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3D3137&IssueNum=3D136

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