The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  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 ea
rly 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 eugeni
cs,’ 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.’