Throughout the site, you can click on the gold-colored terms to see their definitions.
Psych
1. Short for psychiatrists or psychologists. Used pejoratively. Hubbard often noted harmful and controlling actions of psychiatrists in his writings and lectures. Evidence of their destructive actions can be seen in actions like prescribing drugs (often with no real effort at other forms of talk therapy), electric shock therapy, and evaluative methods of therapy that harm patients and don’t help them get well.
Some examples to consider:
- Nellie Bly’s investigative journalism into Women’s Lunatic Asylum of New York City back in the late 1800s. After getting herself admitted to the asylum for ten days, she observed and experienced events of gross mistreatment of patients.
- Thomas Szasz, a famous psychiatrist, spent much of his career maligning psychiatry’s method of labeling mental illness and coercive methods of treatment. He wrote several books on the faults of then-modern psychiatry and went on to co-found the Citizen’s Commission for Human Rights with the Church of Scientology.
- The practice of lobotomies where an ice pick was used to sever the frontal lobes of a patient’s brain. This practice arose in the early 20th century and reached an all-time high in the 1940s and 1950s.
- The overbearing and sexist methods for diagnosing and “treating” hysteria in women.
A few LRH Refs that express his views regarding psychiatry:
- HCOB 26 APRIL 1982 The Criminal Mind and the Psychs
- HCOB 29 Nov 1981 Dianetics and Scientology Compared to 19th Century Practices
- HCO Bulletin 26 AUGUST 1982 Pain and Sex
- LRH’s 1982 novel Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000