These so-called “deprogrammers,” better described as psychiatric depersonalizers, are money-motivated individuals who kidnap others for profit. Their methods include brainwashing, imprisonment, food and sleep deprivation and various forms of torture. Such activities are clearly against the principles held by Scientologists — and have been proven to be against the law as well.

Why is Scientology opposed to psychiatric abuses?

As the stepchildren of the German dictator Bismarck and later Hitler and the Nazis, psychiatry and psychology formed the philosophical basis for the wholesale slaughter of human beings in World Wars I and II. Psychiatry uses electric shock, brain-mutilating psychosurgery and mind-damaging drugs to destroy a person and make him “docile and quiet” in the name of “treatment.”

Psychiatric methods involving the butchering of human beings and their sanity are condemned by the Church. Scientologists are trying to create a world without war, insanity and criminality. Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetable-like state so that he can be controlled.

Scientologists do not believe that psychiatrists should tell their patients what they think is wrong with them. This interjects lies or ideas which are not true for the individual himself, thereby violating his basic integrity. Scientologists believe that one should find out for himself the source of his troubles since this gives him the ability to improve conditions in his own life and environment.

Scientology and psychiatry will always be working at cross-purposes. Scientology is a religion and recognizes that man is a spiritual being. Psychiatrists view man as an animal. Psychiatry is strongly opposed to all religions as it does not even recognize that man is a spiritual being.

Scientologists disagree with the enforced and harmful psychiatric methods of involuntary commitment, forced and heavy drugging, electroconvulsive shock treatment, lobotomy and other psychosurgical operations.

By the Creed of the Church of Scientology, the healing of mentally caused ills should not be condoned in nonreligious fields. The reason for this is that violent psychiatric therapies cause spiritual trauma. At best, psychiatry suppresses life’s problems; at worst, it causes severe damage, irreversible setbacks in a person’s life and even death.