Category: scientology

It was the last day of school! Yay! Well, except for finals. Boo.

As I was walking to the bus, there was a nice older gentleman handing out pretty pink fliers that said, “Free Career Analysis.” I took one, because I always feel sorry for people standing out in the cold trying to hand out pieces of paper. I guess on the last day of school, that’s a reasonable thing for people to be trying to hand out. No doubt it was the gateway to some sort of quasi-scammish recruitment thing…

And then I noticed the address on the corner of the flier. Church of Scientology Mission of Boulder. Well then. Scammish and not so quasi about it.

It’s the ol’ Scientology personality test, tarted up as a career analysis. There’s even a fancy graph to illustrate how you can find your “career barriers” and “get rid of them!” Career barriers is code for Thetans, I suppose. “Discover how well you communicate!” and find out “Are you aggressive enough? Competent?” The flier is the 200 question personality test, which you’re supposed to fill out and mail back to the Scientology Mission of Boulder. It includes such gems as:

5. Do you intend two or less children in your family even though your health and income will permit more?
6. Do you get occasional twitches of your muscles, when there is no logical reason for it?
55. When hearing a lecturer, do you sometimes experience the idea that the speaker is referring entirely to you?
61. Do you ever get a “dreamlike” feeling toward life when it all seems unreal?
79. Are you sometimes considered forceful in your actions or opinions?
132. Do some noises “set your teeth on edge”?
143. Do you usually criticize a film or show that you see or a book that you read?
162. Would you like to “start a new activity” in the area in which you live?
171. Do you spend too much time on needless worries?
191. Does life seem rather vague and unreal to you?

It sort of runs the gamut from stupidly general to bizarre to just plain creepy, then back again. I think #162 is my favorite question, personally. You’re apparently supposed to complete this test and mail it to them so that they can work up a “confidential test analysis” for you.

There is of course nothing against the Scientologists handing out their fliers at CU. To me, it certainly seems creepy and dishonest to frame their infamous personality test as “free career analysis,” particularly when they’re handing it out on the last day of school to many students who are heading toward graduation with not a little bit of dread about the job market. However, that’s par for the course for Scientology. And I am also sad to say, it’s not the most creepy and dishonest I’ve seen out of religious recruiters on campus. I’d hope since they at least put their name and address on the form, most of the kids at CU would be wise to the tricks, or be able to find out about them very easily. Operation Clambake is the third site on the list when you google “scientology,” so a source of good information is definitely at the fingertips of people who want to look.

One thing I will say for the nice older gentleman handing out these fliers: at least he wasn’t wielding a huge sign and screaming that we all deserve Hell.

This semester, two of my classes are in Munzinger, the psychology building. Never mind that neither of them are psych classes (one’s my Japanese History class, the other my Women’s Lit class). I’m guessing it’s a space consideration.

Yesterday, I saw several signs posted around the building, which said things like, “Ritalin: Sterility is only one side effect” and along the bottom it had little bits of paper you could pull off for CCHR.ORG. So, I was curious and did a bit of googling and looking around so that you don’t have to.

As I suspected from the anti-psychology messages on the fliers, CCHR is a front group for the Church of Scientology. Actually, the organization admits almost as much on their own website; they say that they were co-founded by scientologists and Dr. Szasz (a fairly well-known mental illness denier), but then quickly go on to say that there are plenty of non-scientologist members since people from all faiths can recognize how utterly evil psychology is. Perhaps; there are vaccine denialists of all faiths and shapes, and I imagine there are a similar spread of psychology deniers. CCHR is basically dedicated to promoting Scientology’s lies about mental illness. They have a very lovely virtual “museum” that’s all about how utterly evil psychology is. I’m pretty impressed by their website, honestly. It’s slick.

After reading through their FAQs, the basic thesis of CCHR is that psychiatric illness should be treated with nutrition and a healthy environment, that it’s caused by physical illness that should be treated medically only, and that the mentally ill who are violent should be remanded to the criminal justice system because they cannot be cured by the evil psychiatrists.

Wow, but that makes me angry. Now, the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent in any way, and from what I’ve been able to find, those with increased risk of becoming violent also have substance abuse problems. But I found NEJM article that sums it up nicely:

Thus, symptoms of psychiatric illness, rather than the diagnosis itself, appear to confer the risk of violent behavior. So patients with schizophrenia who are free of the acute psychotic symptoms that increase this risk, such as having paranoid thoughts or hearing voices that command them to hurt others (called command auditory hallucinations), may be no more likely to be violent than people without a mental disorder.

So the idea of tossing someone who has been afflicted by an illness and may not have been responsible for their own actions in to the criminal justice system is pretty disturbing to me. Particularly when you’d be throwing them in to the criminal justice system and then not treating them if CCHR had its way.

But this is also the sort of attack I’d really expect from a Scientology front group. This goes right along with the infamous Tom Cruise attack on Brooke Shields for her decision to be treated for postpartum depression:

There’s ways, [with] vitamins and through exercise and various things… I’m not saying that that isn’t real. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s an alteration of what I’m saying. I’m saying that drugs aren’t the answer, these drugs are very dangerous. They’re mind-altering, antipsychotic drugs. And there are ways of doing it without that so that we don’t end up in a brave new world. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation, okay. And she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry.

As a profession, psychology’s got a spotty, scary history, to be sure. It’s certainly not perfect, and it’s certainly got a long way to go. (Consider, for example, how long they kept homosexuality in the diagnostic manual.) There are a lot of fields right now, including medicine, that have the same sort of cringe-inducing history. Nearly any institution you could look at, from the mental health field to democracy in the United States, has some stupendously awful things that you could pull from its history.

And as an organization eager to attack on the basis of historical malfeasance, Scientology hasn’t got a leg to stand on. But we already knew that Scientology as an organization is cowardly, underhanded, and hypocritical.

The big question is if the institution as it stands works in a provable way.

Modern medicine? Yes.

Democracy in the United States? Most of the time.

Psychology? For therapies that have been well researched and proven, such as the treatment of scizophrenia with antipsychotic medication, yes.

Scientology? Well, it depends on how we’re going to classify “working.” If we’re talking sucking money out of people while mentally abusing them, it’s a definitive yes. If we’re talking about just the very basic accomplishment of doing more good than harm, no.

What warms my heart is that several of the fliers already have a handwritten note on them that links the organization to Scientology.

Further reading:
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part I
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part II
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part III
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part IV
Neurologica Blog: Mental Illness Denial – Part V