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Scientology’s New Psycho-Out Museum

New York Post, USA
Nov. 20, 2005
Philip Recchia
www.nypost.com

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Monday November 21, 2005

Scientology is taking its fight against psychiatry to the streets – namely Sunset Boulevard.

The church will open a “Psychiatry: Industry of Death” museum next month in L.A., complete with vintage instruments of torture, images of electroshock therapy and “rare archival footage of psychiatry’s brutal treatments.”

Created by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights – which was founded by the church in 1969 “to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights” – the museum will also show new documentaries featuring “dozens of medical doctors, attorneys [and] educators.”

Top church officials were in New York last week promoting the exhibit at the International Association of Scientologists’ annual meeting.

Consumer Alert: Scientology

“Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill… (Scientology is) the world’s largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.”
- Justice Anderson, Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia, quoted at What judges have to say about Scientology

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is one of several Scientology front groups. It is involved in hate propaganda against psychiatry and psychiatrists.

“L. Ron Hubbard was addicted to psychiatric drugs from an early age until the day he died. Even though he told his followers not to take psychiatric drugs, he did so himself to the extent that he was addicted to them. They are the source of the very strange “OT” levels on which people are expected to talk to the souls of dead space aliens called “body thetans.” He was well aware of the mental problems he was having. Until he “invented” Dianetics® he had no money for psychiatric help and so he once wrote to the Veteran’s Administration and begged for psychiatric help.”
- Source: Hubbard begged for psychiatric help

Scientologists call psychiatry a fraud? What nerve!

Research resources on Scientology

“It was like stepping into a time warp,” one source, who attended the meeting, told The Post. “All this horrific turn-of-the-century stuff that hardly exists anymore – patients convulsing from electroshock therapy, torture caps on people’s head, Pavlov and his dogs.”

Before a clip from one “educational” documentary was introduced, a church spokesman warned the audience that some images were “too gruesome to show” with “women and children” present, the source said.

According to Scientology, psychiatry is the root of all evil on the planet.

“The psychs [have] destroyed every great civilization to date and are hard at work on this one,” church founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote in 1982.

Tom Cruise entered into a high-profile battle with the profession this summer by declaring on the “Today” show that “psychiatry is a pseudo-science.”

He also criticized Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants to deal with her postpartum depression.

The museum, which opens to the public on Dec. 16, will be housed on the ground floor of CCHR’s headquarters on Sunset Boulevard.

CCHR did not return calls seeking comment.