The Null Device

Scientology considered mortally harmful?

A court was told that a 25-year-old Sydney woman with a history of mental illness, who stands accused of murdering her parents, tried to get medication to treat her illness, but her parents objected because their Scientologist beliefs prohibited psychiatric drugs. Unfortunately, the young woman's thetans got the better of her.
A psychiatric report tendered to Bankstown Local Court yesterday said the 25-year-old woman accused of murdering her father and sister in Revesby last Thursday had tried to get help twice last year, but her Scientologist parents had a religious objection to psychiatric intervention.
Mr Brooks went on to argue that modern psychiatry used many methods that were largely "unproven" and such psychiatric assumptions - such as chemical imbalances in the brain - simply did not exist.
The Vice President of the Church of Scientology in Australia has issued a statement saying that the link between Scientology and the murder was "a bit of a red herring", and claiming defamation. Meanwhile, a psychlo psychiatrist from Sydney University has denounced the Scientologists as "flat-earthers".

What is safe to say that, if they find a gene responsible for Scientology, its incidence in the gene pool is slightly less frequent now.

There are 2 comments on "Scientology considered mortally harmful?":

Posted by: Newob ('http://www.myspace.com/tedbowen',) Mon Jul 16 16:47:14 2007

Mental problems are not an illness. Illnesses are caused by infections by living bacteria or by viruses. No infection has been discovered to correspond to anything officially labeled a 'mental illness'. No biological or genetic etiology for 'mental illness' has been established by the scientific method. The list of 'mental diseases' in the official work of literature that psychiatrists rely on (the DSM) is arrived at by a vote, not by science. The criteria for inclusion is not empirical evidence but the potential for monetary profit.

Mental anguish and emotional suffering are real but psychiatry is a pseudoscience that takes advantage of those problems. Problems of the psyche may very well be rooted in software rather than in wetware. Physical and behavioral symptoms of mental problems may be a tangential result of emotional distress, but the current model attempts to reduce mental processes to biology. Can software be reduced to hardware analogies?

I do not know what medication the woman in que

Posted by: Newob ('http://www.myspace.com/tedbowen',) Mon Jul 16 16:48:43 2007

[...]

I do not know what medication the woman in question was attempting to get before she went bonkers, and maybe it would have helped her. But the fact that a mood altering drug may have an expected, desirable, or predictable result on behavior does not validate the biological psychiatric model or prove any psychobabble about 'chemical imbalances.' The biological psychiatric theory makes no predictions that can be proved or disproved by experiment.