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SPEARHEADING SOCIAL REFORM
And as psychiatry still stumbles in circles around that cul-de-sac into which they were led, they have had to step over the bodies of the victims lying in their wake. Even a car mechanic learns about engines – what they are, what motivates them, how they work – before diving in with a wrench. Psychiatry has not only missed this basic premise, but its tools are dangerous. In lieu of understanding, their only instruments are a vast cornucopia of mind-altering pharmaceuticals, electroshock machines and surgeons’ knives. And as the basic premise is inaccurate, and they actually have no idea what they are treating (other than easily observed symptoms) the results are naturally dismal, to say the least. In fact, psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz has called psychiatry the single most destructive force to have affected the American scene in the last fifty years.
The obvious question that arises is what does one do in such circumstances? They have claimed a leadership position by virtue of the fact there were no other candidates, and now they are expected to deliver. Unfortunately, they have virtually no idea what they are doing. It is a difficult position to be in. And so we have the undeniably applicable maxim: Desperate men do desperate things.
L. Ron Hubbard was one of the first to notice the nakedness of this emperor – and the desperation of his acts. From his earliest contact with the field in the late 1940s, he saw that something was very wrong: an arrogance, a venality, a lack of concern for the individual and a serious incompetence. He noted with due outrage that for all the talk of enlightened psychiatric care, unmanageable patients were still routinely warehoused in dreadful conditions, drugged into vegetative states that left them permanently impaired, and punitively electroshocked. He also noted that, beyond food, clothing and a padded cell, psychiatry possessed no tools at all for dealing with the mentally ill.
To sum up, Mr. Hubbard wrote, psychiatry stood for ineffectiveness, lies and inhuman brutality. Its basic assumption revolved around the idea that with enough punishment, anyone could be restored to sanity; and if all else failed, one could always sever the patient’s prefrontal lobes. With this and more in mind, Mr. Hubbard declared it to be the Scientologist’s duty “to expose and help abolish any and all physically damaging practices in the field of mental health.” Thus came about the formation of CCHR — the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.
 
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