The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (23 page)

This is not true.

A Swiss national of Christian stock, Jung was never an editor of Nazi papers. He maintained friendships with Jews and helped Jewish psychotherapists retain membership of an international body in flat defiance of Nazism. In his 1936 essay
Wotan
Jung described Germany as ‘infected’ by ‘one man who is obviously “possessed”…rolling towards perdition.’ Hardly Zeig Heil.

Cruise continued: ‘Look at the drug methadone. That was originally called Adolophine. It was named after Adolf Hitler…’

This is not true.

Intensity and nice teeth do not of themselves prove historical knowledge or intellectual rigour or common sense. Cruise is spouting a modern myth. Methadone was invented in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s but it was never called ‘adolphine’ or ‘adolophine’ or ‘Dolphamine’. At the end of the Second World War, the Western Allies expropriated many German genuine scientific advances, for example those in rocketry and medicines. In 1947 pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in the United States introduced methadone as ‘dolophine’ – from the Latin for ‘dolor’ = pain and ‘fin’ = end. The nonsense term ‘adolphine’ first surfaced in the United States in the early 1970s. If you think about it for two seconds, the Nazis were picky about what they allowed to be named after Adolf Hitler. An SS division was fine and dandy but no-one would name a chemical substitute for opium desperately needed by the growing number of wounded German soldiers in Adolf’s honour. That would have been foolish.

Cruise is talking poppycock. Cruise’s bigger point – regurgitated to me by Jan – that psychiatric drugs and psychiatry itself are bad because they were the product of the Nazi mind is not just not true. It is
bonkers
. A number of racist German psychiatrists did take part in the Nazi euthanasia, true. But Hitler and Himmler set up the Holocaust, not psychiatry. Many psychiatrists were Jewish and were murdered by the Nazis. Jewish psychiatrists who could, fled Nazi Germany, among them Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter – the mother-and-son team of psychiatrists who diagnosed George III’s porphyria. Many non-Jewish psychiatrists also fled. To blame psychiatry for the Holocaust is nonsense with a capital N. It is to tell a lie about history and that is not good.

Bearing in mind the Church’s proclaimed hatred for psychiatry, I should point out that I’m not an advocate for psychiatrists. They strike me as being like bin men or pest control officers. Society needs them. They can make mistakes. But they are not inherently bad. Once I went to see a psycho-therapist after I had returned from Algeria where the stories I had investigated about torture by the junta against so-called Muslim extremists were unutterably depressing. The therapist asked some weird questions so I stopped going and bought a toaster instead which seemed to do the trick. But psychiatry, which is medicine’s honest attempt to treat mental illness, is not evil.

‘And they’ – the psychiatrists – ‘decided’ – Jan’s words echoed in my mind – ‘who was going to be killed.’

I fear they are brainwashing me. I fear that if I put up with anymore of this I will go quite mad.

The pressure never ceased. Jan moved into the shadows and Marla took over – Scientology’s version of brain-tag-wrestling. A tall, beautiful woman in her late 40s or early 50s with long blond hair, Marla was one of a number of high profile Scientologists who had demonstrated on the streets of Washington DC in 1999, along with Juliette Lewis and Kirstie Alley, holding placards warning that psychiatrists were, ‘hooking kids on drugs’. Marla’s script was exactly the same as Jan’s: psychiatry and its heinous crimes. When Marla stopped, Jan took over, then back to Marla, and on and on…

So, I said, for example, why would Jewish psychiatrists endorse a Nazi policy?

‘Which Jewish psychiatrists, and what period?’

I didn’t know the answer to her question. The three of us stopped in front of a display showing, guess who? A Nazi psychiatrist.

‘He became a Nazi psychiatrist. You can watch the documentary but there is something like more than 30% of psychiatrists were part of the National Socialism. Even before the Nazi party was in full fledge and the whole Holocaust section happened in this horrible…’

But Jan, I said, you see the mind trap here? There were also Nazi bus conductors. Because there were Nazi bus conductors does not mean that all bus conductors were Nazis.

‘Bus conductors,’ said Jan, ‘didn’t come out with an ideology that led to six million Jews being murdered and 11 million people being killed. They didn’t actually turn on the gas, they didn’t do the first experiment in a psychiatric hospital where 18 people were actually murdered while psychiatrists watched and went yeah give it a thumbs up. Now let’s put it into mass production.’

I struggled on: because there were Nazi bus conductors, does not mean all bus conductors were Nazis. There were many psychiatrists who at the time said eugenics is wrong, this Nazi rubbish is wrong…

‘You keep going back to Germany… name the psychiatrist… So are you saying that Nazis?’ Both women seemed to be attacking me. ‘Less than a handful of psychiatrists in Germany said “whoa this is…” while the rest of them go and murder…’

You only need one psychiatrist, I said, to expose the flaw in your logic.

‘One psychiatrist? So if one psychiatrists disagrees with the Holocaust that means that psychiatry is actually OK?’

Listen, I said, I am not an expert on pre-war British psychiatry, or pre-war American psychiatry. But what I am spotting is a very, very simple but massive flaw in your logic. Because there were some psychiatrists who were Nazis does not mean that psychiatry is Nazi.

‘It is not the logic…’

Well, what is the logic then? Because this man, he is a Nazi psychiatrist therefore psychiatry…

‘He wasn’t a Nazi psychiatrist when he came up with this theory. This came up in the 1890s. Now listen. Have you actually studied this? Have you studied this?’

Are you addressing my bus conductor point?

‘Are you looking at the fact that the bus conductors taken aside, this was a…. No this is a psychiatric period…’

There were Nazi bus conductors. Therefore all bus conductors are Nazis?

‘That is irrelevant.’

In front of me, horrible pictures of children, suffering, emaciated faces, half-lifes in Hitler’s death camps.

Jan and Marla kept up, in rotation, until, in my mind’s eye, they mutated into one another. I found the joint attack from the two women hard to deal with. Tommy and Mike watched on, expressionless.

‘OK, so you have 65,000 people a year who are still given electro shocks. We want to watch this one.’

It was time for yet another horror video. I sat down on a bench and someone pressed play.

The video voice-over began on a grim note: ‘In 1938 two Italian psychiatrists decided to observe that before slaughtering pigs in order to make the pigs more docile they were applying electrodes to their temples… This stunned the pigs but it didn’t kill them and they could then slaughter them. Well, this gave them the encouragement to try inducing convulsion with electricity. You will see teeth falling out, broken spines, bones knocked out of joint, broken bones and people with internal organ damage from being restrained while they were having this uncontrolled writhing…’

I have seen a river in Rwanda full of bloated corpses, victims of a massacre.

I have seen a morgue in Osijek full of zipped open thoraxes of freshly dead.

I have seen an old Chechen lady gibber with fear after the Russians had bombed her home.

But watching Scientology’s electro-shock horror video was more unsettling because of the ill-logic driving the horror. It was like watching a horror movie of great cruelty and being told this is not a horror movie, this is true.

‘It jump started in 1848,’ the video was just getting into its stride, ‘when an explosion blew a steel rod straight through the head of the railway worker Phileas Gage. While Gage survived, his personality was dramatically altered.’

The photograph of this hideous accident, in which a metal spike speared through Phileas’s brain, shot up on screen.

‘Seventy years later Portuguese neurologist Egaz Moniz…’

Reinhardt, the black-clad Sea-Org cameraman was crouching on the floor with his camera pointing up. Not to be outdone, Sylviana did the same. They looked like two great black bug-eyed creepie-crawlies.

‘…and pouring pure alcohol directly into the brain killing the tissue of the brain lobes. Moniz called this new procedure a lobotomy…’

At Barton Peveril Grammar School, my friend Gaz Lovelace liked to say: ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy…’

‘…Dr Walter J Freeman who became the most infamous practitioner he discovered he could do it faster without having to drill through the skull …and he would just lift up the eye and stick nothing more than an ice pick right into the brain … and then just rake the thing back and forth until he was satisfied this would cause a massive disruption of brain tissue and then pull it out…’

Mike Rinder and Tommy Davis were staring at me, chewing gum in sync.

‘…travelled the country in his loboto-mobile hacking apart his patients brains on stage or sometimes right there in the vehicle. They lobotomised a million people in the 40s and the 50s and the beginning of the 60s…’

The video stopped, thank God. Lobotomies are now discredited, thank God.

I did not know this at the time, but not one million people suffered lobotomies. Around 70,000 did, worldwide. That is, of course, 70,000 victims too many but it is hard to see why anything is gained by multiplying the number of victims by 14. A major cause of its fall was the rise in effective anti-psychosis drugs in the 1950s. I did not know it for a fact then, but the very first scientific criticism of lobotomy was made in 1944 in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
: ‘The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance.’ One of the very first people to question the practice from 1947 onwards was Swedish psychiatrist Snorre Wohlfahrt, who called it ‘rather crude and hazardous in many respects.’ Cybernetics inventor and brilliant US mathematician Norbert Wiener said in 1948: ‘Lobotomy… has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier.’ It should be noted that these criticisms were made before the birth of the Church of Scientology.

The moment the tape stopped, Jan was at me again. This absence of time to reflect, to weigh up, to think things through, is the woof and warp of what some say is the black magic of the Church of Scientology; it certainly was a constant in the minds of ex-Scientologists.

‘… surgery is still being performed in the UK as well,’ she said, ‘so do you think that that is a valid form of therapy to be damaging the brain, cutting it open to try and change behaviour? That is Psychiatry. 110,000 Americans are subjected to it each year, 65,000 British. That is the wave of shock. So the older you are the more shock you get. So if you are a ten year old, and ten years olds have been given electro shock except that we had that practice banned in California in 1975….that’s how… How old are you?’

I am 48, I said.

I was staring at the model of a head suffering an electric shock: plasma lightning strikes in see-through plastic.

‘That is how long the shock is coursing through your body. If we go to 80…’

I wanted to run away; I had had enough; more than enough.

I think, I said, you have made your one-sided point in a very one-sided way, and what you are saying is that psychiatry does this, therefore psychiatry is inherently evil. Now I believe that there are some psychiatrists who don’t agree with this.

Marla opened up: ‘What is the other point? You said there was one side of our… What is the other point?’

It is annoying me, I said, I can’t remember his name, but there was a psychiatrist during the First World War in 1917 in Netley in Hampshire and he treated a whole bunch of the Tommies who had war shock, including I think the poet…

‘Oh, don’t tell me, it is William Sargent.’ It wasn’t.

No, all I know is he treated the poet Siegfried Sassoon. But he didn’t believe, if my memory is correct, in any of this. He believed in sitting down and talking to people. But he is a famous psychiatrist and he didn’t believe in this.

The name of the heroic psychiatrist I’d forgotten was William Rivers, who fought the military mind-set that said shell-shock was a kind of cowardice, and treated Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and others.

Marla banged on: ‘But that is not our point. Our point is “don’t you think ECT and electro shock treatment is barbaric?”’

It looks barbaric, yes.

‘Exactly,’ said Marla. ‘And that’s our point, the study we have done today…’

But I am not a psychiatrist.

‘But you will have to be to understand. If a child puts his finger in a light socket we know that is bad, same premise. There is no more science to psychiatry than sticking your finger in a light socket and having up to 450 volts of electricity coursed through your brain. Don’t you think that’s bad?’

I, well, it looks horrific, it looks barbaric.

‘That’s right. That is our point.’

Jan took up the cudgel: ‘There is a lot of literature that the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association puts out about electro shock that is one sided. They will actually diminish the amount of memory loss. One of the most, greatest advocates of electro shock for 30 years has been saying that it doesn’t cause memory loss…’

Somewhere around here I just wanted it to stop. Perhaps it was Jan’s relentless tone. This may sound ungallant, but I found there was something especially strident about Jan’s voice, a chain-saw cutting into a Eucalyptus tree while the resident Koala bear squealed its head off.

‘But if we today are still using electro shock treatment, and we are still using psycho-surgery, if we are damaging the brain and driving people in order to change their behaviour? And the number of people who are becoming mentally ill is escalating rather than going down. There is a serious problem with psychiatry.’