Scientology and Psychiatry

Why Scientology Is Against Psychiatric Treatment

Scientology draws strong connections between physical and spiritual health. By improving the soul, or thetan, through spiritual counseling, Scientology posits that followers will be more healthy and able-bodied, until theoretically they can shed the need for a physical body at all for interaction with the world.

The Church of Scientology does not encourage people to eschew medical treatment entirely. They recognize that medical doctors should treat legitimate medical ailments, while Scientologists can address its spiritual causes. However, they largely do not recognize psychiatric disorders as having physical roots. Instead, they view them as being entirely spiritual in nature and, thus, requiring only spiritual treatment such as auditing.

Objections Specifically Concerning Psychiatric Treatments

Scientologists have deep concerns regarding treatments commonly prescribed by the psychiatric profession, including:

• Electroshock therapy (or ECT) and brain surgery (including lobotomy), which can have severe side-effects and is effectively mutilation of the body
• Psychotropic drugs, which sedate and alter the reality of patients to make them more docile and controllable without addressing the underlying conditions. The decreased awareness caused by many of these drugs is also considered highly damaging.
• Verbal therapy sessions, where the therapist informs the patient what is supposedly wrong with him, rather than helping the patient discover for himself the underlying problems, which Scientology considers fundamental for true spiritual healing.

In addition, because Scientologists believe that disruptive engrams are formed through the experience of trauma, the violent nature of many treatments is, in fact, counterproductive in terms of recovery, since it is engrams that cause disabilities in the first place.

In short, Scientologists believe psychiatric treatments do much more harm than good, which is why they warn Scientologists and non-Scientologists alike to steer clear of them. As one official website states: "At best, psychiatry suppresses life’s problems; at worst, it causes severe damage, irreversible setbacks in a person’s life and even death." (Scientology Catechism - Why Is Scientology Opposed to Psychiatric Abuses?)

Criticism of The Psychiatric Profession

The Church of Scientology is highly critical of the entire psychiatric profession. It considers psychiatrists and related professionals to be peddling pseudo-science for profit to such an extreme that they have labeled psychiatric practices as violations of basic human rights. To combat psychiatry, the Church formed the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (or CCHR) in 1969.

Psychiatric medical professionals are also accused of treating humans as soulless beings, no different from animals, an idea quite anathema to Scientology.

Finally, Scientologists view psychiatry as a tool used in brainwashing, murder and other heinous acts. They blame the profession for the development of Hitler, Stalin, the 9/11 terrorists, the Columbine killers, and others guilty of committing some of the most heinous acts in modern history.

Non-Scientology Objections to Psychiatry

Scientologists are not the only people to severely criticize psychiatry. The CCHR has non-Scientology members, and there are organizations independent of the Church of Scientology also dedicated to combating the practice of psychiatry in whole or in part. Objections include:

• Failing to meet the definition of a hard science, which ergo places psychiatry into the category of pseudo-science
• People being treated against their will
• Definitions of disorders being too vague to produce non-arbitrary diagnoses.
• Overly brutal forms of treatment (including ECT and lobotomy)
• Overly controlling and demeaning forms of treatment
• The profession too often being used to marginalize those who do not fit the social status quo, misdiagnosing their outlooks or behaviors as an illness
• Treatments generally causing more harm than good
• Psychiatrists’ overly-close relationship with pharmaceutical and insurance companies

Non-Scientologist objectors, however, generally do not view psychiatry as a conspiracy theory, nor do they blame the profession for modern world tragedies like the Church of Scientology does.

Misconceptions

Contrary to the claims of some Anti-Scientologists, Scientology is not against the medical profession as a whole. They accept that physical ailments require physical treatments under the supervision of doctors and other health professionals, and there are plenty of medical doctors who also believe in Scientology. In fact, Scientology does not even object to medical treatment for the physical causes of mental illness (although they do not accept such theories as "chemical imbalances" to explain mental illness, because there is no medical test available to validate such a diagnosis).

Controversies

While Scientologists lay the deaths of millions of people at the feet of psychiatry, many non-Scientologists are equally critical of the Church’s alternative treatments for psychiatric disorders. They contend that the Scientology regiment of vitamins and spiritual training are entirely ineffective, and that the Church’s position against the use of medication has led to multiple suicides and homicides of patients in need of proper treatment.