By systematically targeting electroconvulsive therapy as part of its war on psychiatry, experts say Scientology could decimate a treatment that is “saving so many lives.”
…
The Atlantic’s 2001 article explained that ECT [Electroconvulsive therapy] had emerged from a terrifying past to become a safe and effective treatment for some of the worst effects of serious mental illnesses. But Scientology, through its campaigns and by pushing legislation, was promoting outdated myths about the procedure for a public that knew little about it.
Miscavige’s November 3 speech illustrated that Scientology is still pushing this agenda more than 20 years later—but with one big difference.
While Scientology has continued to campaign against ECT on various fronts, it has pursued a little known but very effective strategy against ECT’s most vulnerable spot: Namely, the two small companies that manufacture the devices that physicians use during the procedure.
For decades, Scientology has quietly waged a litigation war against those two companies, SigmaStim and Somatics, and it has both nearly on the ropes.
Scientology knows that if the two companies go out of business, federal regulations mandate that doctors will no longer be able to use their devices, and ECT will become unavailable in this country and around the world.
Those medical providers say that ECT is a safe procedure that is saving lives every day, and they are extremely concerned that it is nearly on the brink of disappearing—and only because of the relentless attacks of Scientology on the device manufacturers, a war that has flown completely under the radar until now.
Wow, that is really a terrible shame. ECT saved my grandfather’s life. We were all nervous about it because of the bad marketing and myths out there (which in retrospect are likely perpetrated by scientology).
It was an overnight change after years of failed treatments. We had our Pop-Pop back.
What was he suffering from? If you don’t mind me asking
I’m not OP, but it’s typically used to treat severe depression.
You know, if the US removed the tax-exempt status from churches, the CoS would have way fewer resources to pull shit like this.
Makes you wonder why journalists don’t bring this up.
You should ask the ones who have.
Which ones? The ones confirmed dead, the ones who disappeared, or the ones in a hole of a federal prison? Oh, I see…
Article 3. [Freedom in religion; right and duty of religious worship]
That all persons have a natural and unalienable right, to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own consciences and understandings, as in their opinion shall be regulated by the word of God; and that no person ought to, or of right can be compelled to attend any religious worship, or erect or support any place of worship, or maintain any minister, contrary to the dictates of conscience…
—Vermont Constitution, 1793
Really wish we could have got that “or erect or support” clause in the US Constitution. Would have made for some interesting court arguments about tax exempt status.
How come only those two companies build those medical devices?
How come Scientology can fuck with them like that?
Why do we still have religion and cults in positions of power?
How come only those two companies build those medical devices?
Not much demand, I’d imagine.
How come Scientology can fuck with them like that?
They have a lot of money, and that’s all it takes.
Why do we still have religion and cults in positions of power?
Because the people who put them in power fall for their bullshit, same as it ever was.
Where is Shelly?
I bet David had her killed years ago. They own the cops so nothing ever comes of the investigations
Aaron Levin Smith made a video on Shelleys whereabouts somewhat recently. IIRC she’s in a compound in California somewhere and she’s fine, by all outward appearances. I’m pretty sure she’s drinking the kool ade like the rest of them.
Appearances can be deceiving. They wouldn’t be hiding her in a compound for years and not responding to inquiries if everything was good between her and the CoS.
From what I understand, she doesn’t seem to be held against her will. If Aaron Levin Smith is to be believed (being that he is a former Sea Org member, I’d say his credibility is good), she’s been seen out and about running errands and the like, but always with a security detail. There’s a decent chance that I’m misremembering something, though, so take this with a pinch of salt.
Yeah people are desperate to believe horror stories especially involving a woman but the reality is very likely she’s just a member of the cult living a relaxed and affluent life on the money they swindle.
How many bets that “security detail” is as much to prevent her escape as it is to prevent anyone else from harming her?
Huh, interesting. Probably not “fine” though since if she’s at Gold / Int Base she’s probably being held against her will, considering that the whole base is sorta built around being like a prison compound and they even have private security “pursuit teams” to hunt down escapees.
Edit: not to say that everybody at Int is being held against their will, but it’s where eg. The Hole is so if somebody is being held, Int is probably where they’d be
From the linked wiki:
According to some former members of Scientology, conditions within Gold Base are harsh, with staff members receiving sporadic paychecks of $50 at most, working seven days a week, and being subjected to punishments for failing to meet work quotas.[2] Media reports have stated that around 100 people a year try to escape from the base but most are soon retrieved by “pursuit teams”. Despite many accounts of mistreatment from ex-members, law enforcement investigations and lawsuits against Scientology have been thwarted by the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and the church’s ability to rely on “ministerial exemptions” in employment law. Scientology denies any mistreatment and calls the base “the ideal setting for professional and spiritual growth”.
The Church of Scientology has a museum in Hollywood, CA called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. They don’t admit it’s affiliated with the church- more on that later- it claims it’s run by the “Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights,” which is one of their lobbying groups.
Right next to it is a restaurant called The Cat and Fiddle, which happened to be where an atheist social group I was a part of when I lived there met up once a month. So one day, we decide to go over. They make you give your name and address to go in, so we gave very obvious fake ones. We were followed by what were very clearly handlers pretending to be other museum-goers who just happened to be hanging out in the lobby when we came in and gave us the sort of pious smiles you often see from religious people when they’re intentionally trying to do something shitty to you.
Once you are let in, they make you watch an incredibly boring movie which lasted about half an hour. It was so boring, I remember nothing about it except “psychiatry bad.” The link I give above shows pictures of the very silly exhibits. Now on the subject of ECT, they literally blame the Holocaust on ECT. Like Germany was giving people ECT and that turned them into Nazis and that’s how the Holocaust happened.
And then you get to the end with a bunch of plaques with their “advisors” and the names are names like John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Isaac Hayes… all the celebrities who are openly Scientologists. They didn’t really hide their affiliation very well.
It was very amusing at the time, and they didn’t charge us any money so we didn’t feel like we were contributing to church bullshit, but it does feel a lot less amusing now.
This is low-hanging fruit for scientology because they actually paint it as scary.
Scientology’s “war on psychiatry” is an accurate description because it’s not that they do not believe in it - they believe its effects are evil. As in, yes, you should have to suffer with depression, and schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders. And then you treat it by joining their church where they basically institutionalize you the same way it was done prior to modern psychiatry.
I mean. Comparing modern ECTs to the shit from the 60s is like saying a doctor testing knee reflexes with the little hammer is the same as taking a sledgehammer to a kneecap…
Modern ECT is a godsend for the people it works for because a lot of times it’s only tried when nothing else is quite working. Its a far cry from what it used to look like, and rallying against it’s modern form is little different from rallying against cholesterol pills.
Why take pills? Just pray the cholesterol away! /s
I was curious how scientology could harass companies into bankruptcy since that seemed like harassment. I couldn’t turn up anything other than this article by searching for the companies names’ and lawsuit or scientology.
It looks like there is a lobbying organization, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), funded by the church of scientology. They look to be funding lawsuits brought by individuals against the ECT device makers. The lawsuits against electronic therapy look to go back to the late 1960s.
This web page looks to be an anti-ECT propaganda page, but it covers their “victory” of bankrupting another ECT manufacturer and it covers their methodology for targeting them and for trying to get the practice banned. Although it is all likely BS, it’s very clear on what their intentions are, so it’s very informative reading even if it is propaganda.
I don’t know enough about ECT to make any kind of informed decision on it, though I do generally trust moderm medicine as a whole. I was more interested in the legal process as it relates to the shared article, so take this as some threads to follow if you want to dive deeper than this article, not as me making any personal stance on ECT, since I know next to nothing about it.
Wasn’t one of the faces of scientology just paid by the french government to star at the olympics?
There’s a scientology building on the way from the stadium back to the metro.
Not sure what to think about this. I hate Scientology, but I’m pretty iffy on ECT. My grandma had those treatments for years and it seemed to treat her anxiety by destroying her memory. I looked it up and treating anxiety with it is “controversial.”
That doesn’t make me an expert in it and maybe there are folks it does wonderful things for, but at least in her case they probably should’ve just loaded her up with Xanax. Not that that is a wonderful option either, but that was really all she wanted and I think she put up with the ECT to try to convince them she needed it.
So Scientology can get bent but I’ll allow for the possibility that maybe the stopped clock could be right here. Or maybe you folks have all seen it work much better than I have.
Edit: I should make clear - science should be challenged by researchers, not Scientologists. That’s how science works - withstand falsification. If this causes any non-idiots to look at the data and reaffirm the treatment, I’m for that. As stated, Scientology itself can get fucked and die in a fire.
Unless you have a medical license or a PhD what you typed holds absolutely zero weight. It’s the equivalent of saying all surgery is bad because a surgeon left a sponge inside my grandma
I think I was petty clear it’s an anecdote. There’s not very much to discuss here other than us nodding our heads in agreement that Scientology is bad. This is a discussion board. I discussed.
It’s anecdotal. There are mountains of data and studies now. Still amazes me that people still argue “Oh, well X is bad because I know 1 person who had a bad experience”
I’m definitely not saying it’s bad. There are tons of possible reasons to explain my experience besides ECT bad.
“I’m pretty iffy on ECT”
“Doctors should’ve loaded her up with pills instead of ECT in her case”
Sounds like you don’t see the merits in ECT, which is perfectly fine. I just disagree with your methods of reasoning used to support this conclusion.
We’re on Lemmy, not a scientific publication… Nothing typed on here holds any weight
The problem is that this would remove ECT even as a desperate final option for treatment.
ECT is not a treatment for anxiety, unfortunately. I’ve seen it work wonders for severe depression, mania, and catatonia, but never for anxiety.
Sometimes I’ve seen ECT being used as a “last resort” treatment for people with issues that can only be treated with psychotherapy, like PTSD or borderline personality disorder, but who have been unwilling or unable to do the work over the course of years and the doctors are lost on where to go next. In these cases ECT is almost universally a failure and the side effects are not worth it.
For someone in a manic episode or who’s experiencing catatonia, some memory loss is a small trade to have your life back.
It is, or at least was, a controversial treatment for anxiety. And my grandma was drug seeking. She just wanted to be bombed out of her mind on Xanax, so I can even see looking for other treatment options out of desperation because nothing worked the way she wanted and they wouldn’t give her enough Xanax.
I get it. It was just hard to watch her after her treatments. At first the memories came back, but eventually they didn’t.
But that’s just my experience. I’m not going to argue with medical science because even if future science shows mistakes were made, it’s not like I have the knowledge or experience to do better. But science grows by being challenged and proving itself or being proven wrong. I’m okay with it being challenged by actual professionals - not by Scientologists.
Lots of medical treatments are improperly applied due to a physician’s poor clinical judgment, and it sounds like that’s what happened in this case. Sorry this happened to your grandma
Tbh honest mate the most likely thing is that’s a coincidence.
It’s used all the time for people who can’t take drugs i.e. pregnant people. And has been shown to be very safe.
100%. I am self-aware here. I’m not a professional, I just was in frequent contact with her during that part of her life. She was in one of those independent living places after my grandfather died, but still had her wits. This wasn’t end of life care. We could carry on long conversations about all kinds of things, past and present. If you’re implying it was dementia or Alzheimer’s, she never was diagnosed with either and lived another 15 years or so.
I know, anecdotes aren’t data. I trust the medical profession as a whole. But there have been a lot of reproducibility issues with studies that have come out, particularly in the area of mental health. And between that and my experience I’m okay with taking another look at the data. But if researchers and clinicians are satisfied, I won’t gainsay that.
There are possible side effects though, like any medical treatment, so the potential risks do need to be weighed against the potential benefits, again like any medical treatment. I’ve seen ECT work wonders for certain conditions though
no wonder why people hate Scientology
The biggest problem with Scientology is that it speaks to our politicians pockets. It’s definitely and sickeningly on its way to becoming Yet Another Religion, and it does so under the cover for legislation that still allows exceptions from the law for cults even when their “fair game” policy is well-documented. It speaks volumes about why certain religious regimes are allowed to do what they do.
Scientology targets the mental health industry because that’s the target base of their most ardent supporters, they are built on targeting the mentally ill and telling them “no, this isn’t an illness you suffer that will require time and effort to treat and will always weigh on you, it’s that you are special and channeling all of these thetans, which is just another name for spirit that makes it sound less recycled” and it gets intentionally crazier as you get to the higher tiers, which requires considerable wealth, so that only the most mentally ill reach it or the most manipulative do so, with the relatively normal people on the bottom trained to win intense staredown contests to make them seem imposing for the PR when they are just empty inside and suffering from a cultural and economical form of sunk cost fallacy.
Shelly Miscavige? Ummm. Must have uh… uhh uhh… misplaced uh. What?
When Balzac and Borpis join up with Scientology, they hold the line… of fake cocaine the church leaders gave them to expose leakers… But shit, still don’t know what happened to Shelly
The inventor of the lobotomy won a Nobel prize. Limitless Peace
