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
CCHR’s main effort has been an international campaign against the use of psychiatric drugs, especially for children. The surgeon general of the United States issued a report in 2001 claiming that more than twenty percent of children ages nine to seventeen had a diagnosable mental or addictive disorder, and that four million American children suffered from major mental illness. There is obviously an immense market for medications to treat such disorders. About ten percent of Americans over the age of six are on antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs are the top-selling category of drugs in the country. They have become a plague on the schoolgrounds of America, with indiscriminate prescriptions creating a new culture of drug dependency—one that the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession bear some responsibility for.
Haggis has been a substantial supporter of the CCHR. As a boy, he says, he spent most of his days staring out the window, daydreaming—a candidate for an attention deficit disorder diagnosis. “I identified with the oddballs and the misfits,” he said. “Those who conform have very little chance of making a difference in life.” He was sure that if his parents had medicated him, he might never have become a writer. He hosted fund-raisers for CCHR in his home. “I simply believe that psychiatric drugs are over-prescribed, especially to children,” he said. “I think that is a crime.”
Scientologists have been seeking ways of criminalizing psychiatric remedies. In the same period that Cruise was chastising Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, Kirstie Alley and Kelly Preston were testifying before state lawmakers in Florida, who passed a bill, written in part by Scientologists, that would hold schoolteachers criminally liable for suggesting to parents that their children might be suffering from a mental health condition, such as attention deficit disorder. Governor Jeb Bush vetoed the bill. Governor Jon Huntsman did the same in Utah. Similar bills have been pushed by the CCHR in other states. In her Florida testimony, Kirstie Alley held up photographs of children who had committed suicide after taking psychotropic drugs. “None of these children were psychotic before they took these drugs,” she asserted, sobbing so hard she could barely speak. “None of these children were suicidal before they took these drugs.”