You think Uluru (used to called Ayers Rock) might suffice?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/ULURU.jpg/800px-ULURU.jpg

Ammo Alamo,

I always enjoy your comments.

The link in my earlier comment is for an audio-only podcast. The actual video that they reviewed can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/PsychiatryAnIndustryOfDeath_201510

The same Internet Archive Member (“onderkoffer”) has uploaded two videos from CCHR. The other one, “The Age of Fear: Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror,” can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/TheAgeOfFearPsychiatrysReignOfTerror.

Thank you for sharing with me your background, education and experience in psychology.

The God Awful Movie review is presented along the lines of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” without the video/movie. The podcast’s host and guest are well versed in their presentation. When the video talks about ECT, one of the hosts has had ECT. He explains easily and logically his success with that recent treatment. (ECT is not accurately presented by CCHR). Later, when the video tackles the subject of Ritalin, the guest shares with us her daily regimine of that drug and just how much it has helped her (as opposed to CCHR’s negative stance on that medication).

Just before scientology and I began a 37-year venture, I took a college class in Psychology (“Psychology 101”). But that’s the extent of my association with the subject.

I liked GAM’s review so much that I’ve listened to it twice. The podcast turns the darkness of CCHR into lightness, making it easier to see where CCHR and the video went wrong. They laugh SO much at CCHR’s absurdities and delight in sharing them with their audience.

Thank you for telling me about “Abreaction Therapy,” which I’ve never heard of, but will find out more about, along with the research I’m doing on how 1950s America received dianetics and, later, scientology.

Thank you for also sharing the book by Mr. Greenberg as well as the future of the psych world and where changes to it will come from.

I hope CCHR is listening.

Ryan is the Greta Thunberg of scientology. An autistic kid, enabled and indoctrinated but not educated or treated, thrust in front of the public programmed with the agenda of his handlers.

Although it does not excuse his attacks or the idiocy of CCHR, it does explain his lack of anything resembling conscious thought in this regard. Just as Greta was sacrificed on the altar of Eco-Stupid, Ryan is the pawn of the CCHR, to be sacrificed in the game, and probably does not know it.

As someone with a similar background (not scientology but another fundamentalist organization), I feel for this kid. I was well into adulthood before I learned of my own autism and when I did, almost all of the abuse I suffered growing up made complete sense and gave me a starting place for my own healing, though it is still very, very difficult to “celebrate” Mother’s Day. His family who hasn’t gotten him the help he needs has done him such an egregious disservice that they should ALL be locked up for neglect and abuse. As should all of Scientology.

Someone like Ryan can seem very cogent and intelligent, and probably is — on only the one dimension. But indoctrination roots itself far deeper in one on the spectrum, and can be nearly impossible to change. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is — things “become” a certain way, and that is how they stay. Our thinking patterns and behavior are different, and often seen as “weird” or “stupid” by the general population, simply because we do not know or understand the “proper” modes of behavior.

Gawd I feel for Ryan. And I don’t know him. I just hope that someday he gets the help that he needs, but I sadly suspect he never will.

Yawn,
You’ve made a good point about someone not knowing what else to do. Like a bad relationship, if it’s all you know, maybe you just put up with the illogic, the unpredictability, and the wrong-o requests for your ‘help’ to solve a problem your oppressor has that you don’t even understand.
I feel bad for the police officer, facing tragedy, injustice, and ill-fate on a daily basis. I feel sorry for Ryan. He probably is being told what a hero he is. Love bombing especially to a younger adult can blind one to what’s really going on. And that they are being ‘worked.’ Having been worked and manipulated to do a number of things I didn’t wish to do by members of Scientology, this really hit me.

At two hours I may have to wait a bit to watch that movie, but watch it I will. I’ve been interested in psychology since my late 30s in 1988. I even went back to college, got a B.A. Psychology, did some volunteer crisis intervention, and later worked a couple of years as an MH/MR Case Manager, working with a client caseload of 20-25 of the county’s more difficult clients. During that time I saw the evolution of the tool used to identify mental health categories, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) from Version 3, 4, and most recently 5.

As Todd mentions, the psych world is evolving as a science. Techniques used in the 40s and 50s are today rarely or more likely never practiced. Hubbard saw a tiny bit of a treatment called Abreaction Therapy, which was tried out on WWII soldiers suffering from what we know today as PTSD. As usual Hubbard took this therapy, which was falling out of favor even as he got his small bit of exposure to it, and made it into something from his imagination called Auditing, over the years adding Past Lives, the E-Meter, and all sorts of Ethics, body thetans, mass, valence, and other gobbledegook to scam the masses. He would have his minions believe the universe was trillions of years old, that everyone had lived before and would live again, that there were trains on Venus, that he had been to the Van Allen Belt – and even Heaven!

But not even those Arselycus claims were enough to send the people packing once they had been involved in his quasi-hypnotic initial training sessions. If there had never been a term brainwashing it would have been invented to describe what Hubbard was all about.

Because genuine college educated Psyches did not approve of Dianetics, Hubbard began his long series of attacks against Psyches. Most of the time he would dig deep into past history to find some obviously ignorant and harmful technique tried when even the best doctors were not much better than the village witch-doctor.

As the changes in the DSM from 1 through 5 show there was a lot of effort to put psyches on a science foundation. No revision to the DSM was more controversial than the change from IV to V, the version in use today. Some categories that groups had adopted as their personal ‘disability’ was dropped from the DSM-V – now insurance would no longer pay for treatment in that diagnosis, which was a very big deal to those affected. “The Book of Woe – The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry” by Gary Greenberg (2013) describes the difficult and often controversial job of revising the DSM from DSM IV to DSM V. But at least the psyches were not sitting on outdated information, instead trying to use the scientific method to make their diagnostic manual more clear, and treatments more effective.

The greatest future changes in the psych world will come from proper use of brain scans to define. diagnose, and treat any number of behaviors. The language of the future in psyche diagnoses and treatment will include such things as SPECT scans, MRI, and brain imaging studies to look into the actual organ which defines our behavior – be it good, bad, or ugly.

The days of a shyster SF author making up stuff from his fertile imagination and selling it as ‘science’ are long gone, thank goodness.

Haha, sometimes I get referred to as being the silent type. Not that I’ve got nothing to say, except I’ve found it’s often better in the long run to say nothing at all about some things. Like, if pressured, “yeah, I see the half empty cookie jar too.” Learning to withhold and be happy about it is a practiced art and very difficult for some to grasp. Rhymes with, “ask no questions, get no lies.”
Lots and lots of businesses operate that way.
Something like Scientology lies for a living. Even TC has finally seen the value of keeping his mouth shut – but it’s taken way too long to learn for you Tom. Your rep is toast.

Yes, cases like Lisa McPherson show that Scientology is repeating the mistakes of the bad old days of psychiatry – while that profession has since moved on, and become more rigorous and science-based. The CofS’ practices and techniques have proved to be dangerous even sometimes resulting in death and suicide, besides many cases of mental breakdowns and other bad outcomes.

And I’ve seen it said that the CofS is now focusing less on services than selling statuses, and moving what is delivered from missions and orgs to guarded locations like Flag, in order to try to better manage the inherent risks, and keep news of harm and abuses from getting out.

There have been clinical trials of ECT – and the FDA “has determined that ECT is a safe and effective treatment”:

“Of course there have been clinical trials in the United States evaluating the safety and efficacy of continuation ECT”
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5137581

Typically CCHR, like the rest of Scientology as well as its founder Hubbard, are a mix of behind the times and uninformed, and just dishonest.

And ECT is an only hope for some people with life-altering or even life-ending depression – I know someone in that category (though fortunately they are trying the newly developed TMS). There were certainly problems with it in the past, including both poorer implementations and over-use on people not suffering severely enough to warrant the downsides, and I’m all for it being carefully limited.