Scientology and Psychiatry - Hubbard and Psychiatry

Hubbard and Psychiatry

L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology's founder, was critical of psychiatry. Referring to psychiatrists as "psychs", Hubbard regarded psychiatrists as denying human spirituality and peddling fake cures. He was also convinced that psychiatrists were themselves deeply unethical individuals, committing "extortion, mayhem and murder. Our files are full of evidence on them."

Anti-psychiatric themes also appear in some of Hubbard's fictional works. In Hubbard's ten-volume series Mission Earth, various characters debate the methods and validity of psychology. In his novel Battlefield Earth, the evil Catrists (a pun on psychiatrists), are described as a group of charlatans claiming to be mental health experts, who rule the alien Psychlo species (whose name means "brain" or "property of" in the Psychlo language). The vicious and degraded Psychlos of Battlefield Earth are often speculated to be Hubbard's personal idea of what psychiatry would end up doing to humanity if left unchallenged by Scientology.

A number of psychiatrists have strongly spoken out against the Church of Scientology. After Hubbard's book, Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health was published, the American Psychological Association advised its members against using Hubbard's techniques with their patients. Hubbard came to believe that psychiatrists were behind a worldwide conspiracy to attack Scientology and create a "world government" run by psychiatrists on behalf of the USSR:

Our enemies are less than twelve men. They are members of the Bank of England and other higher financial circles. They own and control newspaper chains and they, oddly enough, run all the mental health groups in the world that had sprung up . Their apparent programme was to use mental health, which is to say psychiatric electric shock and pre-frontal lobotomy, to remove from their path any political dissenters . These fellows have gotten nearly every government in the world to owe them considerable quantities of money through various chicaneries and they control, of course, income tax, government finance —  Wilson, for instance, the current Premier of England, is totally involved with these fellows and talks about nothing else actually.

Hubbard's efforts to cast the field of psychiatry as the source of all of humanity's problems are exemplified in a policy letter written in 1971, in which he attempted to redefine the word "psychiatrist" to mean "an antisocial enemy of the people":

Psychiatry and psychiatrist are easily redefined to mean 'an antisocial enemy of the people.' This takes the kill-crazy psychiatrist off the preferred list of professions. This is a good use of the technique as for a century the psychiatrist has been setting an all-time record for inhumanity to Man.