At 6616 Sunset Boulevard you can find the ‘Psychiatry: An Industry of Death’ exhibition. Tommy led me along the line of greeters: Jan Eastman, a blond, middle-aged Australian lady, President of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), Bruce Wiseman, President CCHR for the USA, Marla Filidei, a blond American and the Vice President of the CCHR, Fran Andrews, the executive director, and Rick Moxam, General Counsel for the CCHR – fancy talk for a lawyer. Someone handed me a cup of tea and I stared at the entrance to the exhibition, a great black steel door, suggesting the entrance to a gas chamber or a totalitarian torture chamber, or, to be more precise, a Hollywood set designer’s idea of the above.
Tommy kicked off by introducing me to the lawyer, Moxam: ‘You may recall from the event’ – I think he was referring to one of the ultra-long videos they showed us at Saint Hill what seemed a trillion years ago – ‘Rick was the one who did the brief that went to the Supreme Court on the admissibility, on psychiatrists being no more valid to give testimony on someone’s sanity in a case than anybody else. Do you remember that from the event?’
I did not.
‘Sure thing,’ I told Tommy.
The CCHR claims to be wholly separate from the Church of Scientology. Ex-
Scientologists say the CCHR is its creature. Tommy just so happened to address what was on my mind. He indicated Team CCHR: ‘They also happen to be Scientologists. Jan is OT5, Bruce is 7, Marla is Clear, Fran is Clear and Rick is 7.’
Clear is where?
‘Before you start the OT levels,’ said Tommy.
Very good.
‘Makes sense? Any questions?’
What is your level? I asked Tommy.
‘Clear.’
That was weird. Tommy was clearly a senior figure in the Church presiding over this unprecedented access and yet he was low down in the pecking order, almost at the bottom rung of LRH’s Road to Total Freedom.
Good. I turned to Mike. And…?
Mike: ‘I am not telling you.’
Well, everybody else has…
Mike: ‘OT5.’
Very good.
Remember: OT3 is the ‘Wall of Fire’, when you find out about the space alien Satan, Xenu. The different OT levels mean that of the seven Scientologists present, Bruce, Rick, Jan and Mike knew about Xenu, but Marla, Fran and Tommy did not; nor could Bruce, Rick, Jan and Mike tell Marla, Fran and Tommy about Xenu lest they kill them by telling them the secret their minds were not ready for. During the previous day at the Celebrity Centre, Tommy professed not to know about Xenu – so if the Xenu story is correct he did not lie, but his mum, Leah, Kirstie and Mike did. The Scientologists were not just lying to me; they were lying to each other. This is the hard-wiring problem which results from a ‘religion’ which keeps its Holiest Writ secret from the lower levels. In Lifton’s book, he tells the story of a Catholic bishop unsuccessfully brainwashed by the Chinese Communists who, upon his release, summed up his admiration-tinged condemnation of his captors in the simple statement: ‘They lie so truly.’
Is the CCHR separate from the Church? Jan told me that it included non-Scientologists and was set up ‘independently by the Church’ which didn’t sound very independent to me. Very good, I said, and asked, what was the ratio of non-Scientologists to Scientologists?
‘Wouldn’t have a clue,’ said Jan.
Are you sure?
‘Absolutely.’
As of that moment outside the CCHR, the organisation’s ratio of non-Scientologists to Scientologists was zero-to-seven.
Very good, smashing, lovely cup of tea, thank you. Shall we go into Dante’s gates of hell?
The great steel door swung open to reveal an interior of Stygian gloom.
From the early 1950s, psychiatrists blew the whistle on the Church. In return, L Ron demonised the doctors of the mad, accusing ‘psychs’ of ‘extortion, mayhem and murder’. Hubbard believed that psychiatrists were plotting a conspiracy to take over the world on behalf of the Soviet Union: ‘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… Their apparent programme was to use mental health, which is to say psychiatric electric shock and prefrontal 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. [Harold] Wilson, for instance, the current Premier of England, is totally involved with these fellows and talks about nothing else.’
Harold Wilson, for all his many faults, did no such thing. Hubbard’s hatred of psychiatry spawned a novel Battlefield Earth, which John Travolta turned into a film of the same name in 2000. The plot of both turns on the war between the evil Catrists, which is, perhaps, a pun on the back-end of the word ‘psychiatrists’, and the alien Psychlo species. Critics say the wretched Psychlos of Battlefield Earth are L Ron’s prophecy of how humanity would end up under the thumb of psychiatry were it not for Scientology.
Critical reception of Battlefield Earth the movie was something of a curate’s egg: ‘a cross between Star Wars and the smell of ass’ cracked Jon Stewart; the Washington Post said: ‘A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth… so breathtakingly awful in concept and execution, it wouldn’t tax the smarts of a troglodyte’; the New York Times said it ‘may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century’ and even Jonathan Ross, who sticks up for Scientology in his biography, said: ‘Everything about Battlefield Earth sucks. Everything. The over-the-top music, the unbelievable sets, the terrible dialogue, the hammy acting, the lousy special effects, the beginning, the middle and especially the end.’
The Industry of Death museum flows from the same creative spring. My guide was Jan Eastman. The very first thing that hits you in the exhibition is a quote from a gent in eighteenth century get-up, Benjamin Rush, talking about how terror acts powerfully upon the body through the medium of the mind and should be employed in the cure of madness.
That is evil nonsense, I said.
Jan said: ‘Benjamin Rush is the father of American psychiatry.’
I did not know anything about Benjamin Rush, then.
‘That’s a psychiatrist that has actually said that.’
That man was talking evil nonsense, I said. But that doesn’t knock out the whole of modern psychiatry.
‘Well, why don’t we actually go through the museum, because you are actually jumping to conclusions.’
The exhibition was organized chronologically, starting with medieval abuses of the mad, moving up to twenty first century torture. I was staring at a medley of pictures of Bedlam, the old London lunatic asylum, where the mentally ill were put on public show and treated cruelly.
They used to poke people with a stick, didn’t they? I said.
‘Yes, so you essentially have that concept that if you use pain, terror, punishment in order to change a person’s behaviour. You seem to have a pre-disposition to talking about brainwashing.’
I hadn’t mentioned brainwashing. How did she know I had brainwashing on the brain?
‘Oh, because I have watched some of your stuff.’
You have already watched the Scientology tapes of me?
‘Absolutely.’
Very good. Has everybody, just out of interest?
‘No,’ said Jan. ‘I personally wanted to see who I was doing an interview with. So if you look at the 1500s you had Bedlam, that actually used again pain, terror in order to change a person’s belief system. And if a psychiatrist or a person or even a relative didn’t like your behaviour this was used in order to change a person’s behaviour or to incarcerate them. So rather than just go into a whole interview about it now, what I want you to see is the first documentary which sets up the whole biological model of psychiatry.’
So long as they are not three hours, that’s fine, I said. I had spoken too soon.
The first video started, illustrated by paintings and drawings of 18th century wretches suffering revolting treatments at Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, one of the world’s first psychiatric institutions, commonly known as Bedlam. The tone of the voiceover was grim: ‘The hospital was little more than a warehouse for those deemed mad. Inmates were confined to cages, closets, and animal stalls, chained to walls and flogged while the asylum charged admission for public viewers. In the 18th century, William Battie was the first to promote that his institutions could cure the mentally ill. Battie’s madhouses made him one of the richest men in England. But his treatments were every bit as inhumane as those practised in Bedlam with not a single patient cured. His financial success triggered a boom in the asylum business, and an opportunity for psychiatrists to cash in on this new growth industry.’
I knew precious little about the history of the treatment of the mad, then. I do now. This is junk history. Some of the grim material, audio and visual, was true and historically correct. Much of it was not. I was being indoctrinated with facts which, once you study them, are not facts; assertions which either cannot be born out or are obviously untrue. All of it was manufactured to make one hate the idea of psychiatry, which is nothing more than the study of how to cure people with sick minds. No doubt, the early doctors of the mad made terrible mistakes. But they were grappling with the unknown, and some of them did good.
Take William Battie, demonized by the Church as a money-grubber who grew rich out of madness. Born in 1703, history tells us that Battie was, for his time, an enlightened doctor, who challenged the conventional wisdom that lunatics should be chained and kept in dungeons. The man who ran Bedlam disliked Battie greatly because of his open criticisms of the very cruelties that are exhibited in the Scientology museum. Battie’s book ‘Treatise on Madness’ – which now, if you dare to use the internet, you can read – sets out in eighteenth century English why a series of cruel and abusive treatments of the mad do not work. There is much wrong in this book, we now know, but it strikes me as an honest attempt to think about the mentally ill rationally and with kindness.
Back to the video, the voiceover still banging away, ‘while those who ran the institutions were getting rich, psychiatrists yet lacked the credibility to maximise their cash flow…’
Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times, wrote Gustave Flaubert. Treating the mentally ill, in the eighteenth century or today, is not a route to making money, and to suggest that it is seems foolish.
‘In order to justify their profession they needed to come with these biological solutions… In essence, torture… For example, one device involved putting the patient into a coffin, closing the lid, and dumping it into a bath of water.’
Again, junk history. True, the mentally ill were ill-treated for centuries. True, they were long thought to be possessed by demons or evil spirits. True, they suffered vile and abusive practices in lunatic asylums. But in 1790 an English Quaker woman, Hannah Mills, fell mentally ill and was admitted to the York Asylum. She died a few weeks after she had been admitted. Her loved ones investigated, and discovered foul conditions where the patients were treated worse than animals. A Quaker, William Tuke, set up a model mental hospital in York, known as the York Retreat, where the mentally ill were treated decently, as human beings. No bars on the windows, no patients manacled. Psychiatrists around the world took note and things began to change for the better.
Higher up the social order, the king of England lost America and then went stark, staring raving bonkers. The madness of King George III was a personal tragedy for him and a harbinger of the future. The radical poet Shelley wrote: ‘An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King.’ But George III’s ministers and court noted that his mental agonies came and went and, when not foaming at the mouth, in his periods of lucidity, George could be sweet and kind and sensible.
From the monarchy down, a new sympathy for the mentally ill grew. It was only with the publication of George III and The Mad Business by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter in 1969 that the king’s malady was explained by intermittent attacks of a hereditary disease, porphyria. The Quakers in York and the king’s illness both changed the climate in which mentally ill people were treated – one century and a half before the birth of the Church of Scientology and an unsung revolution not reflected in their exhibition.
The video had still not finished: ‘Pushing the biological theory of mental illness a step further an American, Benjamin Rush… He bled his patients for madness… He was so revered that in 1965 Rush was enshrined as the father of American psychiatry on the seal of the American Psychiatric Association…’
The video hammered on, pile-driving images of horror and cruelty into my brain.
Junk history, again. The exhibition’s take on Rush is unfair and ahistorical. Rush may have written that terror can treat madness, and that is wrong; Rush may have believed in blood-letting, and, that, too is wrong, but that was a common medical view in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth. History sees Rush as a great and humane doctor. Born in 1745, he became a signatory of the American Declaration of Independence, the greatest single political document ever written, and was an early opponent of the slave trade and capital punishment. In the field of mental health, he was revolted at the grim conditions mental patients were held in the Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1792 – two years after the Quakers in York started their movement for proper psychiatric care in England – he campaigned for the state to build a separate ward where mental patients could be treated more humanely. He opposed the reigning practice of chaining mental patients in dungeons, noted that patients given decent work recovered much better than those kept locked up and is considered a pioneer of occupational therapy. In his book, Diseases of the Mind, he wrote: ‘It has been remarked, that the maniacs of the male sex in all hospitals, who assist in cutting wood, making fires, and digging in a garden, and the females who are employed in washing, ironing, and scrubbing floors, often recover, while persons, whose rank exempts them from performing such services, languish away their lives within the walls of the hospital’.
Rush was one of the first doctors to identify alcoholism as a form of medical disease not a sin, and one of the first to identify Savant Syndrome, in which autistic patients, as we now call them, can be brilliant mathematicians. Tom Cruise starred in a film about a sufferer of the syndrome, Rain Man, in 1988, having already enjoyed his first contact with the Church through his then girlfriend, Mimi Rogers, which makes Scientology’s demonization of Rush all the more peculiar.
Had I been less ignorant of the true history of Rush, I would not have accepted Scientology’s version of him uncritically. Yet again, the Church says x is bad; on critical examination of the evidence, there is some fragment of truth to what the Church says, but it is partial, unfair and untrue to the whole picture.
The video had not finished: ‘As the 1800s wore on psychiatry…. In curing madness threatened their financial… forcing them to invent a new medical model. The cure that was promised wasn’t delivered. So by the 1860s and 70s the growing pessimism was covering Europe and North America, and if that didn’t… The new institutions were ever growing in size but not growing in their effectiveness. The 20th century brought more medical models. American psychiatrist Henry Cotton mutilated his patients by removing their body parts, declaring this a breakthrough in the treatment of mental illness. The earliest target was the teeth, and then the tonsils, and the sinuses… so stomachs need to go, spleens need to go, colons need to go as public outcry escalated over torture and maiming of patients, psychiatrists would have been… Each one hailed as the miracle of cure. But each one was ultimately proven no more effective nor less brutal than the last.’
I watched dumb-struck as I saw up on the video screen a big close-up of a mouth. Historically, it is true that New Jersey psychiatrist Henry Cotton did great harm, killing hundreds of his patients with wholly unnecessary operations before his death in 1933. It was a classic case of one charismatic man wielding power without checks and balances, without scrutiny.
The video still hadn’t finished: ‘a huge part of what psychiatry has done really comes down to torture…’
Very good, very high production values, I said. This is ‘Telly Twaddle’ for the ‘look’ of a film, leaving any comment as to its content unsaid. I was trying to be polite.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Jan.
‘We are quite good at making documentaries,’ said Tommy.
I was commending you for your production values, I said, silently leaving the matter of editorial judgment on the tiles, waiting for the cat to sniff it. I turned to Tommy, and asked: when is your film coming out by the way?
‘I am not going to tell you,’ said Tommy.
Well, you will know when ours is coming out.
‘You will get it in the post,’ he said.
But we would like to have your film so we can put a bit of your film in our film, I said. It will make our film more fun. Nothing doing.
‘OK,’ said Jan, seizing hold of the conch, as it were: ‘So this is where we start off the Pavlovian conditioning and it goes into brainwashing.’ She quoted some German psychiatrist - Wilhelm… Ho??? Who?’ I didn’t quite catch the name – ‘who said the soul does not exist…’ My brain cells were dying, hand over fist… ‘…which is something that we are philosophically opposed to…’
A word-picture of the scene: we’re in a big gloomy box on Sunset Boulevard, being filmed by two black-clad Scientology camera people, Reinhardt and Sylviana, plus a black-clad soundman, watched over by seven Scientologists, four of whom know about their space alien Satan and three of whom do not, looking at ghastly pictures of human beings being tortured, brains being drilled into, slack-jawed wretches being bled, helpless figures electrocuted. The Natural History Museum in South Kensington it is not.
I absorbed some of the exhibition display reading material. I see, I said, that on the stuff on Pavlov you say this is the basis of behavioural psychology, the inhuman brainwashing methods used by the former Soviet Union, China, and the infamous CIA mind control experiments of the 1950s. You are aware that the irony is that some people say that Scientology is a brainwashing cult?
‘Well,’ said Jan, ‘I have worked in CCHR for 30 years. And if you want to know about brainwashing, our organisation has been investigating brainwashing at least since 1969. There is an entire section in this museum about brainwashing.’
OK, I said, congenially. Shall we have this argument in the brainwashing section?
‘Yes, we can.’
Very good. Let’s get to the brainwashing section.
‘Well, we are going to do this first.’ She motioned to another video, lurking in the dark, waiting to be played.
How long is this video?
‘It is five minutes. I am not going to show all of them to you.’
The second video was grim, grimmer than the first.
I was watching a screen full of babies screaming.
I was watching electric-blue sparks flash inside a see-through skull.
I was watching monsters in gowns drill into a wretch’s brain.
The tone of the commentary becomes more manic, the words more difficult to understand. It was like eating a dish of parboiled madness, with a side salad of lunacy: ‘For nearly a year Skinner isolated his daughter in a box similar to those he had built for rats. The child was stimulated…like a chicken or a rat in a cage …they are given this electric shock therapy for no other reason but for them to have pain…Other techniques include administering electric shock to treat sexual… shooting high voltage through surgically implanted electrodes… And while this science without soul… billions in research… psychiatric… the death of millions.’
That was the end of the second video. During my time as a war reporter I have seen a man with his eyeballs blown in by the pressure wave from heavy artillery in former Yugoslavia, I have seen a man with a slice hacked out of the back of his head by a machete in Rwanda and I have listened to Chechen resistance fighters describe how they were tortured by the Russian secret police. But this stuff in the Industry of Death was sickening, twice over. Sickening one, because of what it reflected was real. Real people had endured this suffering. Sickening twice, because of what I felt to be the twisting of half-facts and quarter-truths into their attack on the doctors of the mad. This was like watching a video of the history of heart surgery only told through the lens of botched operations, dead patients and greedy heart surgeons.
‘That is contemporary modern psychiatry that’s using pain and torture against children to try and change their behaviour,’ said Jan. ‘And it is our organisation…’
She was talking wicked gibberish. Jan moved on to eugenics, the idea that ‘genetically inferior’ people should be castrated or killed. It enjoyed some popularity in the 1920s, and was chiefly practiced in the Deep South of the United States against mainly black victims, and in Nazi Germany.
‘The establishment of eugenics,’ said Jan. ‘That was used throughout America. It led to y’know tens of thousands of people being sterilised… British psychologists that actually came up with that theory. And it spread throughout, not just America, throughout Britain, but also through Nazi Germany.’
Am I correct in thinking, I asked, that there were psychologists and psychiatrists who believed that eugenics was wrong?
‘But it was a theory that was still being used throughout Britain,’ said Jan. ‘It was a theory that was being propagated to the public and people were sterilised in the UK.’
Ping-pong, we went, pong-ping. She was utterly confident of her side of the argument. I was scraping away at my memory.
What I am trying to say, I said, is that there are [and were] many British psychiatrists and American psychiatrists that would have absolutely nothing to do with eugenics.
Jan carried on, relentless: ‘If you have a look at the policy of eugenics, whether it is an official policy from the government, it still permeates throughout psychiatry.’
What was so unbearable and exasperating about this argument was that I didn’t know my facts. The facts are: many doctors and psychiatrists opposed eugenics, then. One such was a man who is now another hero of mine, Dr Hyacinth Morgan MP, a man of rare courage despite his silly name. After graduating as a doctor in 1909 he worked in a Glasgow mental hospital before becoming an army medic in the First World War. He then became a Labour MP and stood up in the House of Commons in 1931 to oppose a proposed eugenics bill. Dr Morgan said the case for eugenics was ‘moonshine’ and concluded: ‘I ask this House to refuse to give leave to introduce this pagan, anti-democratic, anti-Christian, unethical Bill.’
The House divided: Ayes, 89; Noes, 167. ‘Moonshine’ is a fair summary of the Church of Scientology, some say. But I didn’t know about Dr Hyacinth Morgan back in the Industry of Death.
Jan carried on, now talking about psychiatry and eugenics: ‘So it is all hidden. It is not out in the open.’
No, that’s nonsense, I said. It is not all hidden. There was a huge argument in the scientific world.
Jan brought up ASBOs being a consequence of eugenics. An ASBO is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, introduced by the Blair government in Britain to crack down on anti-social misconduct. In 2007 some were concerned that the powers used were unfair and disproportionate. The argument that eugenics leads to ASBOs is rubbish. Then Jan said something that that made my head hurt as if she had hit it with an axe.
‘The psychiatrists set up the whole euthanasia campaign in the concentration camps. They went into the concentration camps and they set it up, and they decided who was going to be killed.’
I struggled to get my head round the meaning of what Jan had just said, effectively that psychiatry paved the way for the Holocaust, that it is a Nazi pseudo-science. It was no slip of the tongue. Tom Cruise thinks along the same lines. Cruise was challenged by a reporter from Entertainment Weekly in 2005 that ‘Scientology textbooks sometimes refer to psychiatry as a ‘’Nazi science”’. Far from disputing that, Cruise effectively endorsed the notion, replying: ‘Look at the history. Jung was an editor for the Nazi papers during World War II.’
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.’
Very good, I said.
Next, it was the story of the drugs industry killing children. Yet again, there was some truth in what they were telling me. Over-prescription and over-use of drugs like Ritalin is a huge worry and a story reported by my colleagues on Panorama. But, yet again, those real worries morphed into a general, unhinged assault on all of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs.
After that, the state’s abuse of children. More graphic photos, but more grim evidence of wrong-doing, extrapolated into a general assault on treating the mentally ill.
Hold on a second, Jan. I… these pictures are terrible. No civilised person could possibly endorse what has happened here, it is plainly wrong. And the state abuse of children is wrong and must be challenged wherever it happens.
‘And that’s why you have an organisation like CCHR. It is there to protect the rights of individuals, to give parents like this grieving mother information to stand up for their rights…’
Time to enter the brainwashing or Mind Control section of the exhibition which was dominated by images of victims of brainwashing. Perhaps the most striking was a colour photograph of black smoke belching from including the Twin Towers on 9/11. For the avoidance of doubt there was a sign saying ‘Mind Control’ in big letters above my head. Tommy swung into view. I was beyond punch-drunk.
He called me a bigot, again.
‘And because you are. See there’s a difference here because what I’m saying is true.’
What’s the time?
‘…and what you’re saying about me being brain washed isn’t.’
No, hold on, what’s the time?
‘It’s 12 o’clock.’
That’s the first bigot of the morning, I told him.
‘And they’ll keep coming.’
It was now three against one. Tommy did his usual riffs – the time he’d spent with me, my lack of respect, my bigotry blah blah – but standing right next to him were Jan and Marla, who would take a bite out of my brain, as it were, the moment he paused for breath. I was firing back, a brainwashing cult here, a brainwashing cult there, but there was something about the accumulated sediment of all that had happened that was sticking to my boots. I didn’t have a moment to reflect what was going on, what they were doing to my head.
‘I want her to explain to you what brainwashing is,’ said Tommy.
‘Do you know what the definition of brain washing is?’ asked Jan.
No. I am not an expert on brain washing.
Jan gave me a book. I read out loud: ‘Brainwashing is the use of isolation deprivation, torture and indoctrination to break the human will. OK.’
We knocked around brainwashing for a long time. They said they first uncovered CIA brainwashing; I said hadn’t the Soviets and the Chinese Communists done it too? We got into the Catholic Church and paedophilia. I told them there is a huge problem with the Catholic Church because of the unmarried priesthood, and that is one of the problems I personally have with the Catholic Church because I do not believe in a non-married priesthood.
And then I said: so that aside, what people who used to be Scientologists say, is that I now realise having left the Church, that it is a sinister brainwashing cult.
Tommy stepped in close: ‘We can just bring this down a couple of notches for a second? You keep accusing my religion, my faith, OK, my faith and the faith of a lot of people in this room, and a faith of millions of people the world over, OK, of engaging in something which by definition involves torture, drugs, sleep deprivation…’
Not necessarily drugs, I said.
‘Of inflicting bodily harm. OK. And what is the methodology? It is a methodology which is widely considered by many people who are not even Scientologists to be one of the most heinous and barbaric things you could ever do to another human being: brainwashing.’
Tommy was calm, smooth, perfectly fluent: ‘And you throw that term around with every Scientologist that you meet and you do it under the cloak of your preface “some people claim”. You claim to be an investigative journalist, which means you investigate things, you get to the bottom of them, and you find out the truth, OK? When you were interviewing and I quote your friend, Shawn Lonsdale, a convicted sex pervert…’
Shawn was the lone videographer, who filmed them filming him filming them. When I had interviewed him in Clearwater a zillion years ago – it was, in fact, only four days before – Tommy had interrupted our interview by reading out his criminal record for having consenting sex with men in a public place.
Hold on a second, I said, I want to say he is not my friend. He is not my friend.
‘I have you on camera…’
OK, I said, I am English, I use irony. Some of the words I use you should not take a literal meaning. It may be a cultural difference between us. But when I would say…
‘Some words you use you should watch what you use, because you are the one who says them.’
OK, I said. But I just think that you have a cultural problem with my use of irony. I am English. Sometimes I say ‘my friend’ when I actually mean, I don’t like this person. But actually that is a subtlety. But when Lonsdale…
‘Well, we’ll put a little endnote on our documentary.’
I turned to Reinhardt’s camera, and addressed it directly: hold on a second, have we got that? When I called Shawn Lonsdale a friend, I could well have been using English irony, and I didn’t actually mean those words.
‘So when you say you’re not friends that actually means that you’re enemies so I’ll remember that now.’
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that I might have been falling into a trap that Tommy had made for me. Shawn was not my friend, and, as a BBC reporter, I did not want to appear overly close to him. But at the same time, as a human being, I felt, then and now, that Shawn was a singular and brave man and Tommy succeeded in thrusting this dichotomy at me so forcefully that I felt I had betrayed Shawn in some way, and I felt guilty about it. It is only on reading Lifton’s book on brainwashing, that I realise how successfully the Chinese Communists used guilt as a weapon to brainwash westerners. For example, an extraordinary brave Dutch priest, Fr Vechten, was racked with guilt generated by his captors long after his release. Tommy succeeded in making me feel guilty that I had betrayed Shawn. For the first time in my direct contact with the Church, I was in serious trouble. Keen to show proper distance from Shawn I now felt guilty that I had disowned him too much. Tommy smoked out my confusion, and went after it like a terrier.
‘When you interviewed him you didn’t once ask him, because he did also use that term brainwashing. And you say OK Shawn, what evidence do you have of that? Because I have investigated and the term brainwashing and the definition of brainwashing almost invariably involves sleep deprivation, lack of food, and things which by all definitions amount to torture. So what evidence, Shawn, do you have that people are tortured?’
I’m John, I pointed out, helpfully.
‘I am saying this is what you should have said to him. Ok what evidence, Shawn, do you have that people have been tortured?
Me: ‘No, hold a second Tommy…’
Tommy: ‘No, no, no I am not stopping you listen to me for a second. You are accusing members of my religion in engaging in brainwashing!’
His voice was raised, just shy of shouting at me.
I wish I had not done what I did next, but I could not help it. Had my father’s death had anything to do with it? I don’t think so. The previous evening’s session with Rick Ross may have had a paradoxical effect, of reinforcing and reawakening the fundamental reasonableness and common sense of objections to the Church and its teachings. I feared I was going to lose my mind, my sanity, my grip on reality. I feared they were out to brainwash me. If I didn’t fight it, then soon I would be saying that psychiatry was responsible for the Holocaust, that I had not been followed by sinister strangers in a Kia Sidona, that the man with the cowboy hat was just passing by the reception desk, that Tommy and Mike were not at our hotel at midnight, that I had made it all up. For the past hour – it felt like an eternity – my brain had been assailed by some of the darkest and cruellest images I have ever seen, and I have seen bad things. But these images were constructed and pressed home by fanatics, members of an organization which people who used to belong to it say is literally maddening; an entity so crazy that half of them didn’t know about the space alien Satan that threatens us all, and half of them did. Worst, for me, was the sense that I didn’t know enough about the history of psychiatry to be able to say clearly and with authority that they were not telling the truth. But about Shawn Lonsdale I knew what Tommy was implying was not true. I had asked Shawn a tough question at the very beginning of the interview. I had asked him: ‘You are a social outcast, a menace, a fruitcake, a nutter. Why would Scientology make those kinds of suggestions about you?’
That was a solid fact, and I could stand by it full square. They were not going to brainwash me. I saw red, my face turned into an exploding tomato. Our two faces were inches apart, back-lit in the curious sulphuric red light of the exhibition, set against the background of a huge blow-up picture of the Twin Towers burning. I had had enough of the Church of Scientology; more than enough; and I fought back, jet-engine loud, screaming my head off as loud as I could holler.
Me: ‘NO TOMMY YOU STOP!’
Tommy: ‘BRAINWASHING! BRAINWASHING IS A CRIME!’
Me: ‘YOU LISTEN TO ME!’
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
Me: ‘YOU WERE NOT THERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVIEW. YOU WERE NOT THERE.’
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
Me: ‘YOU DID NOT HEAR OR RECORD ALL OF THE INTERVIEW.’
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
Tommy’s repeated mantra adds to the utter weirdness of the scene: it’s as if he had been trained to repeat a phrase over and over again, so that it gives the other party no break or opportunity to return to calmness. What I was driving at was that Tommy couldn’t say for a fact that I was cosy with Shawn because he wasn’t there at the beginning of the interview. Tommy only invaded it half way through – and our tape could prove that. Frankly, it was a very minor point to lose one’s temper over, as is often the case when you chuck your toys out of the pram.
Me: ‘Do you understand? Did you understand?’ Suddenly, weirdly, my voice drops in volume.
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime against humanity.’
Me: ‘YOU ARE QUOTING THE SECOND HALF OF THE INTERVIEW.’
I am back to yelling again: quite why I stopped shouting and then started again is inexplicable. Perhaps I should see a psychiatrist.
Tommy: ‘You are accusing my organisation of engaging in a crime.’
Me: ‘NOT THE FIRST HALF. YOU CANNOT ASSERT WHAT YOU’RE SAYING. Now will you listen to me?’
I shot a quick look at Mole, who flicked her eyes at me, once. Oh, dear, what had I done?
I apologised then and I apologise now.