Psychiatry, Tom Cruise and Scientology
Victoria Hardy
January 22, 2008
Tom Cruise sure has been in the news a lot of late, between jumping on Oprah´s couch, attacking psychiatry and Brooke Shields´ use of anti-depressants and now, with the odd leaked Scientology videos, he seems to be generating a lot of attention. And I´ve noticed in the reporting of each incident we are being led to believe that Tom Cruise is insane or brainwashed or worse. So I began wondering, why? The media certainly wants us to see Tom Cruise, he´s everywhere, it´s hard to escape, but they also want us to believe that he has fallen on the wrong side of the crazy wall, why? Could it be what he´s saying? Could it be his attack on psychiatry?
I´m not a fan of Mr. Cruise and I haven´t been to the theater in years, but when I heard his views on psychiatry, I sensed he was telling the truth. But the media has created a thinking in our nation that if you are against psychiatry and the accompanying pharmaceuticals, you must be one of those crazy Scientologists. I don´t care if Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, this is America and we are free to believe in whatever belief system we choose and I choose not to align myself with any organized religion, but I do understand there is merit in the idea that psychiatry is a suspect science.
The manual used to define mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and each new entry into this manual is done by member vote, versus research and discovery of known pathology. According to psychiatrist Ron Leifer, "So the DSM is basically an arbitrary classification of thoughts, moods and behavior decided upon by a committee of psychiatrists who are picked by the American Psychiatric Association."
Psychiatrist Colin Andrew Ross states, "It´s bogus that you can even accurately identify who has the behavior of schizophrenia. It´s bogus that you can tag it to genes. It´s bogus that you can detect those genes through any kind of test. So the whole is basically bogus." And clinical psychologist Ty Colbert paints a disturbing picture with his words, "So we can theoretically find a way to drug every set of symptoms that´s different from what we think should be normal. So we could have hundreds of different situations in the future and which we are attempting to drug. So you just extrapolate that over a couple generations and it could be the fall of our civilization."
I´m not a fan of Mr. Cruise and I haven´t been to the theater in years, but when I heard his views on psychiatry, I sensed he was telling the truth. But the media has created a thinking in our nation that if you are against psychiatry and the accompanying pharmaceuticals, you must be one of those crazy Scientologists. I don´t care if Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, this is America and we are free to believe in whatever belief system we choose and I choose not to align myself with any organized religion, but I do understand there is merit in the idea that psychiatry is a suspect science.
The manual used to define mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and each new entry into this manual is done by member vote, versus research and discovery of known pathology. According to psychiatrist Ron Leifer, "So the DSM is basically an arbitrary classification of thoughts, moods and behavior decided upon by a committee of psychiatrists who are picked by the American Psychiatric Association."
Psychiatrist Colin Andrew Ross states, "It´s bogus that you can even accurately identify who has the behavior of schizophrenia. It´s bogus that you can tag it to genes. It´s bogus that you can detect those genes through any kind of test. So the whole is basically bogus." And clinical psychologist Ty Colbert paints a disturbing picture with his words, "So we can theoretically find a way to drug every set of symptoms that´s different from what we think should be normal. So we could have hundreds of different situations in the future and which we are attempting to drug. So you just extrapolate that over a couple generations and it could be the fall of our civilization."
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