|
Rappaport posted:Is "mental hygiene" the first step of the anti-therapy stuff that scientologists and other woo folks peddle nowadays? Unironically, yes. I wrote a research paper on this in grad school. Back in 1955, before Alaska had become a full-fledged state, Congress was debating the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, a law that would allocate funding to develop a mental health infrastructure for the Alaska Territory. Before then, the only way to get mental healthcare in Alaska involved being assessed by a jury to be ruled sane or insane. Patients were often kept in prison until they were either deemed sane, or until transfer to a private hospital in Oregon could be arranged. At no point in this process were mental health professionals involved. By the end of 1955 a small group of concerned Catholic housewives calling themselves the American Public Relations Forum (APRF) operating out of Burbank, California, had caught wind of the bill. The APRF had previously led a successful campaign pushing UNESCO-produced materials out of Los Angeles schools. They also pushed back against other laws meant to bolster mental healthcare in California. In their eyes, modern mental healthcare was a Jewish communist plot, and Alaska’s proximity to Siberia just meant that the bill was meant to introduce stealth-gulags. They joined up with similar groups, such as the Keep America Committee and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.; the latter of which was especially prolific in local politics in Texas. During the fifties and sixties they absolutely terrorized the Houston educational system, organizing mass phone calls and letter writing campaigns, eventually taking over the school board They were responsible for having dozens of teachers and school administrators fired for supposed communist sympathies. They once succeeded in stopping the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, from being able to meet in Houston, because Alger Hiss had once attended one of their meetings. By the time 1956 rolled around resistance against the bill consisted of anti-Communists, anti-internationalists, libertarians, white supremacists and the Church of Scientology. The church had been founded three years prior, and saw the bill as a perfect vehicle to get traction on a national stage. To this day, fighting against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act is presented as the church’s first battle on the national stage against the evils of psychiatry, referring to it as the ‘Siberia Act.’ L. Ron Hubbard himself penned a booklet, Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, which was basically designed to be the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for psychiatry. It claimed to have been written by Lavrenty Beria, chief of the Soviet Secret Police, in 1936. According to the book, pretty much every form of psychiatry, as well as child labour laws and the Income Tax Act of 1909, were communist plots meant to subvert the United States and create a pliant, servile population. Even before Hubbard’s own estranged son admitted his dad was the author of the book, pretty much nobody outside of hysterical anti-communist cranks paid any kind of heed to it. Even those who didn’t recognize the Scientology language used in the books (phrases like thinkingness or psycho-political technology) saw that it was clearly crackpot stuff with very little basis in reality. Fortunately the bill had the support of more mainstream religious groups and the Alaska territorial government. As such the alliance of Scientology and the fledgling movement of schoolboard terrorists gained very little traction in Congress. Barry Goldwater put forward a minor amendment clarifying that the commitment procedures laid out in the bill could not be used to move a US citizen from the lower 48 states to Alaska, and the final bill passed through the Senate unanimously. In spite of this, Scientology’s internal teachings still claim that they were the only ones who managed to stop the ‘Siberia, U.S.A.’ bill. According to the Church’s reading of history, the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act was a direct response by the psychiatric profession to Scientology ‘exposing them’ - an attempt to build a concentration camp in the wastes of Alaska where any critics of psychiatry could be put away.
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 13:29
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 11:33 |
|