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Weird Scientology
Tom Cruise is bad for your mental health.
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Scientology, spiritual home of Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman and a
lot of
As laid out in Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's book, Dianetics , the real causes of everyone's mental distress are painful memories suppressed from childhood, even the womb. These traumatic memories create "engrams" on our brains. The only way to be mentally healthy is to be "cleared" of these traumatic memories, which can only be accomplished through scientology "auditing." (In the cult-jargon of scientology, the rest of us are PC, or pre-clear.) And auditing costs money.
But wait, there's more.
Talk about traumatic memories and engrams is just a cover - a superficial scientology "reality level."
Scientology's real dogma is that we are all suffering from the traumatic memories of aliens, called thetans, who were murdered on Earth millions of years ago by the evil overlord Xenu, who trapped them in a volcano and then blew them up with nuclear weapons (hence the volcano reference on the cover of Dianetics ). So what we all need to be cleared of are parasitic alien ghosts haunting us with bad memories.
This quasi-religious, sci-fi belief system has been widely mocked for being silly (which of course it is); but it also puts Scientologists directly at odds with the mental health profession, in the exact same way that religious creationists are at odds with natural historians and evolutionary biologists. Scientologists are the creationists of mental health. This casts them in the role of deniers - denying a vast and growing body of scientific evidence in the field of behavioral neuroscience.
Tom Cruise has insisted, bluntly, "There is no biochemical imbalance." And, of course, that means all medication for mood or cognitive symptoms are out; taking lithium, in this view, is equated with taking recreational street drugs. As a cure for depression-like feelings, Cruise offers instead diet and exercise (at least at the first reality level, until you are told the whole thing about the distraught thetan spirits).
Interestingly, Scientologists aren't the only deniers of mental illness. Beginning in the 1960s, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who has been known to attend Scientology functions, began from the point of view of legitimate criticism of the practice of psychiatry or mental health, but he then went beyond all reason to the denial of the very existence of mental illness.
Such ideas were first formulated, however, before the revolution of neuroscience, which has enabled us, for example, to actually image the activity of neurotransmitters in the brain. We can now see the biochemical imbalance. Given what we now know, denial of mental illness denies the basic fact that the brain is an organ, just like the liver and kidneys, only vastly more complex.
This denial is particularly sad in an age that has seen rapid strides in the treatment of mental illness. Today, some people who 20 years ago would have been potential suicides are now treatable with one of dozens of new drugs. Those drugs don't work for everybody, and they don't make one's life perfect, but they can help keep depression from becoming crippling; they can allow people to lead relatively normal lives.
It is a shame that the
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