Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(113)

“You know, Scientology is something that you don’t understand,” Cruise responded. “It’s like, you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist, okay.”

“So, it doesn’t replace religion,” Lauer offered.

“It is a religion, because it’s dealing with the spirit. You as a spiritual being.”

Lauer then asked about a comment that Cruise had recently made about actress Brooke Shields, who had written that antidepressants had helped her get through her postpartum depression. “I’ve never agreed with psychiatry—ever!” Cruise said. He was dressed in black, his muscular arms on display; he had a stubble beard and his hair was draped in bangs across his forehead. He radiated an athletic intensity and a barely contained fury. “As far as the Brooke Shields thing, look, you’ve got to understand, I really care about Brooke Shields. I think, here’s a wonderful and talented woman. And I want to see her do well. And I know that psychiatry is a pseudo-science.”

“But, Tom, if she said that this particular thing helped her feel better, whether it was the antidepressants or going to a counselor or psychiatrist, isn’t that enough?”

“Matt, you have to understand this,” Cruise said, glowering. “Here we are today, where I talk out against drugs and psychiatric abuses of electric-shocking people—okay, against their will—of drugging children with them not knowing the effect of these drugs. Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?”

“The difference is—”

“No, no, Matt.”

“This wasn’t against her will, though.”

“Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt.”

“But this wasn’t against her will.”

“Matt, I’m asking you a question.”

“I understand there’s abuse of all these things.”

“No, you see, here’s the problem,” Cruise said. “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

Lauer was taken aback by Cruise’s aggressiveness, but he pressed on. “Do you examine the possibility that these things do work for some people? That yes, there are abuses, and yes, maybe they’ve gone too far in some areas. Maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin. Maybe electric shock—”

“Too many kids on Ritalin?” Cruise said, shaking his head. “Matt.”

“Aren’t there examples where it works?”

“Matt, Matt, Matt, you don’t even—you’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is.” He said there were ways that Shields could solve her depression—he mentioned diet and exercise—other than drugs. “And there are ways of doing it without that, so that we don’t end up in a brave new world. The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation, okay. And she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn’t understand in the same way that you don’t understand it, Matt.”

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SCIENTOLOGY’S HISTORY OF psychiatry holds it responsible for many of the ills that have affected humanity—war, racism, ethnic cleansing, terrorism—all in the pursuit of social control and profit. The church has opened an exhibit, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,” on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It describes the often grisly and benighted practices that have characterized the evolution of the profession, including madhouses, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and the proliferation of psychiatric drugs to treat spurious diagnoses. Scientology views this history as a long march by psychiatrists to manipulate human behavior and institute world government.

Although it’s not included in the exhibit, Hubbard’s chronology of psychiatry actually begins “five billion years ago” with the development of a particular technique that was developed “in the Maw Confederation of the Sixty-third Galaxy”:

Take a sheet of glass and put it in front of the preclear—clear, very clear glass—which is supercooled, preferably about a ?100 centigrade. You got that? Supercooled, you know? And then put the preclear right in front of this supercooled sheet of glass and suddenly shove his face into the glass.…

Takes about twenty seconds, then, to accomplish a total brainwash of a case.

Now, if you wish to play God, as the whole-track psychiatrist did at that time, all you have to say at this time is, of course, “Go to Earth and be president,” or something like that, you know? And a thetan, being properly brainwashed now, will take off, and that’s that.



Hubbard also blamed psychiatrists, allied with the tyrant Xenu, for carrying out genocide in the Galactic Confederacy seventy-five million years ago. There are obvious parallels in this legend with the Nazi regime, which used doctors, including psychiatrists, to carry out the extermination of the mentally ill, along with homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jews; and also by the Soviet government, which employed psychiatrists to diagnose political dissidents and lock them away. Hubbard lived through these shameful events, and they no doubt colored his imagination.

After Hubbard’s death, Miscavige continued the campaign. In 1995, he told the International Association of Scientologists that the church’s goals for the new millennium were to “place Scientology at the absolute center of society” and to “eliminate psychiatry in all its forms.” The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist. In this view, psychiatrists have been responsible for the Holocaust, apartheid, and even 9/11. The commission is not above bending the truth to make its point. The president of CCHR, Dave Figueroa, asserts that Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a psychiatrist who took control of bin Laden’s “thought patterns.” “Whatever type of drugs that Zawahiri used to make that change in bin Laden, we don’t know,” Figueroa explained. “We know there was a real change in that guy’s attitude.” This view is reiterated in the terrorism portion of the museum. (In fact, Zawahiri is a general surgeon, not a psychiatrist.)10