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Here is an excellent article about the Scio/Psycho Fued:
Thinking Critically About Scientology, Psychiatry, and Their Feud
stumble digg reddit del.ico.us news trust mixx.com
Posted September 10, 2008 | 11:29 AM (EST)
For many Americans who gain their information solely from television, all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, "You don't know the history of psychiatry. . . . Matt, you're so glib." The mass media has been highly successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of psychiatry with anti-drug zealots from the Church of Scientology, the lucrative invention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.
However, Americans who gain their information outside of television and beyond the mass media may be aware of a secular, progressive tradition that is critical of how psychiatry has diverted us from examining societal sources of our malaise. This secular, humanistic concern was articulated, perhaps most famously, by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980).
In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote:
"Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself."
-snip-
The source of the mutual hostility between psychiatry and the Church of Scientology, as depicted by the mass media, centers around psychotropic drug use; but my sense is that the root cause of their feud is a fierce competition between them. Both establishment psychiatry and Scientology are competing for the same people -- those more comfortable with authority, dogma, and insider jargon than with critical thinking.
Both the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatry's DSM (the official diagnostic manual in which mental illnesses are voted in and out by elite psychiatrists) have much more to do with dogma than science. Both Scientology and psychiatry embrace science fiction techno-babble that poses as scientific fact. In Scientology's "auditing," the claim is that the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-Meter) can assess the reactive mind of the preclear by passing a small amount of voltage through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like empty soup cans which are wired to the E-Meter and held by the preclear. But psychiatry is no more scientifically relevant, as its trendy chemical-imbalance theories of mental illness have shelf-lives of about a decade, with establishment psychiatry most recently having retreated from both their serotonin-deficiency theory of depression and the excessive-dopamine theory of schizophrenia.
While Scientology can claim auditing adherents, and psychiatry can claim even more antidepressant advocates, neither treatment has been shown to be consistently superior to a placebo. And rather than validating their treatments with legitimate science performed by independent, financially unbiased scientists, both Scientology and psychiatry rely on what amounts to a well-funded public relations apparatus.
Full article Link here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-e-levine/thinking-critically-about_b_125019.html
Thinking Critically About Scientology, Psychiatry, and Their Feud
stumble digg reddit del.ico.us news trust mixx.com
Posted September 10, 2008 | 11:29 AM (EST)
For many Americans who gain their information solely from television, all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, "You don't know the history of psychiatry. . . . Matt, you're so glib." The mass media has been highly successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of psychiatry with anti-drug zealots from the Church of Scientology, the lucrative invention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.
However, Americans who gain their information outside of television and beyond the mass media may be aware of a secular, progressive tradition that is critical of how psychiatry has diverted us from examining societal sources of our malaise. This secular, humanistic concern was articulated, perhaps most famously, by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980).
In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote:
"Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself."
-snip-
The source of the mutual hostility between psychiatry and the Church of Scientology, as depicted by the mass media, centers around psychotropic drug use; but my sense is that the root cause of their feud is a fierce competition between them. Both establishment psychiatry and Scientology are competing for the same people -- those more comfortable with authority, dogma, and insider jargon than with critical thinking.
Both the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatry's DSM (the official diagnostic manual in which mental illnesses are voted in and out by elite psychiatrists) have much more to do with dogma than science. Both Scientology and psychiatry embrace science fiction techno-babble that poses as scientific fact. In Scientology's "auditing," the claim is that the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-Meter) can assess the reactive mind of the preclear by passing a small amount of voltage through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like empty soup cans which are wired to the E-Meter and held by the preclear. But psychiatry is no more scientifically relevant, as its trendy chemical-imbalance theories of mental illness have shelf-lives of about a decade, with establishment psychiatry most recently having retreated from both their serotonin-deficiency theory of depression and the excessive-dopamine theory of schizophrenia.
While Scientology can claim auditing adherents, and psychiatry can claim even more antidepressant advocates, neither treatment has been shown to be consistently superior to a placebo. And rather than validating their treatments with legitimate science performed by independent, financially unbiased scientists, both Scientology and psychiatry rely on what amounts to a well-funded public relations apparatus.
Full article Link here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-e-levine/thinking-critically-about_b_125019.html