“It is neither overstatement nor a cliché to say, if you are looking for the greatest evil on Earth, look no further than psychiatry.”
Those were among the words Scientology leader David Miscavige delivered to a crowd of followers that included Tom Cruise and several other Scientology celebrities, including Walking Dead actress Jenna Elfman, during his opening remarks at the organization’s annual tribute to its biggest donors this past November.
It was the 39th anniversary gala of the International Association of Scientologists, a typically annual event held under a giant tent at Scientology’s UK headquarters, a Sussex estate known as Saint Hill Manor where founder L. Ron Hubbard had lived in the 1960s, and the first IAS gala to take place there since a four-year hiatus imposed by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Outward appearances suggested that the pandemic had been very hard on Scientology, and especially on Miscavige, who had been dodging process servers in the U.S. looking to serve him papers on various lawsuits brought by former members. One federal court found in February 2023 that Miscavige was purposely evading servers and named him a defendant in a labor trafficking case.
Now, with Cruise, who had flown in on his own helicopter that afternoon, in attendance, and several thousand Scientologists in the audience, Miscavige had an opportunity to convince his followers that all was well as he launched into his first international speech in four years.
And almost the first thing he can be heard saying on an audio recording of the speech that was smuggled out later, was that vehement denunciation of psychiatry.
From Scientology’s perspective, calling psychiatry the “greatest evil on Earth” is not an exaggeration. Founder L. Ron Hubbard claimed that psychiatrists were the most malevolent force in the universe who had been implanting booby-traps in the minds of what would become human beings for trillions of years.
Today, Scientology’s anti-psychiatry campaign is carried out by a front group Hubbard established in the 1970s, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. And Miscavige, in his speech, said CCHR’s mission was “more vital today than ever.” He explained that its goal was “the overriding CCHR strategy of inform, expose, prosecute, obliterate.”
As in, obliterate the psychiatric profession itself.
And just to make it crystal clear what he meant, Miscavige later added that CCHR is pushing legislation “to forever rid this world of psychiatry. Hence, the CCHR campaign tagline, ‘psychiatry global eraser.’”
23 years ago, The Atlantic published a lengthy examination about how Scientology and CCHR’s anti-psychiatry focus was particularly aimed at one target: ECT.
Electroconvulsive therapy, the application of electrical current to stimulate a grand mal seizure, is more popularly known as “electro-shock” therapy by the public.
The Atlantic’s 2001 article explained that ECT 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.
“It’s an incredible story that goes back decades,” says Harold Sackheim, one of the national figures who is most associated with ECT and helped develop many of its advances at Columbia University. “I’ve been dealing with this since entering the field in 1979. And Scientology looks like it’s going to be successful at killing an industry.”
Adrian Kettering, who runs SigmaStim, wanted to make sure it was clear just how unusual it was that she was willing to give an interview at all, and especially about something as sensitive as litigation against her company.
But the situation was so dire, she said, that she was willing to talk. Kettering also said that some of the most well-known physicians in the field, who were also normally very reluctant to talk, would also be willing to speak out precisely because they are so concerned about the threat posed to ECT by Scientology.
“Duke, Yale, Harvard—all of the top figures in the field are very worried,” Kettering says in a telephone call from SigmaStim’s office. “We get calls from doctors saying, ‘You can’t go out of business. We’ll have hundreds of patients dying if you do.’ We’re trying so hard to stay in business.
Kettering is SigmaStim’s CEO, but it’s also a family legacy. The firm, previously known as MECTA, was started by a physician who died in a fishing accident in 1980. Kettering’s paternal grandfather, an engineer, decided to rescue the firm at that point and make it his own. Kettering eventually took over the business from her parents.
The company has been the target of Scientologist attorneys for more than 30 years, she says, and by 2021 that battle bankrupted the company. By sheer luck, she says, a COVID-era law, passed to lessen the pandemic’s effect on struggling businesses, allowed MECTA to reorganize as SigmaStim and continue on.
Still, the lawsuits keep coming.
“They’re copycat lawsuits,” she says, and they are so boilerplate, she recognizes the same typos that get copied over and over again. “They’re laughable, they’re poorly written. But they don’t care. They just want to file seven or eight of them every year so we can’t get liability insurance. And they have endless funds to do it.”
She says that SigmaStim has only 13 employees, and her competitor Somatics only about half of that. (Representatives at Somatics did not respond to a request to be interviewed, but did send links to litigation and articles written by the company’s CEO.)
“ECT is in many ways the closest psychiatry gets to laying on hands. I have never seen a catatonic patient that didn’t have a profound improvement after a single session.”
— Harold Sackheim, former chief of Biological Psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute
Both companies manufacture machines about the size of a suitcase that deliver precise electric current with paddles applied to the temples of patients who are sedated during the procedure. The electric current lasts only a few seconds, and is designed to create a seizure that might cause some slight twitching, but nothing like the violent reactions the public associates with ECT because of films like 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
After coming to, a patient will experience serious short-term memory loss that providers say soon goes away. They deny reports that there is long-term “brain damage” from the procedure, and they say that it is providing near-miraculous effects for people who have exhausted other approaches to their depression or catatonia. Both sides in the battle over ECT estimate that about 100,000 Americans are undergoing treatments each year.
“Both of my parents are Holocaust survivors. And when I started getting involved in ECT, I was blown away by its humanistic aspects,” Sackheim says in a telephone interview. “My very first patient, a woman, believed she was burning in hell. She put a noose around her neck and hanged herself at one point. She had four treatments of ECT and was well. A week later she was back home, and teaching school.”
Several other nationally-known providers said the same thing repeatedly: ECT is not merely a treatment, but a cure.
“It’s under-appreciated how severe depression can be,” a provider from a major national university said, asking not to be named for fear of retaliation from Scientology. “For those folks, it is remarkable the turnaround that they can have. We have a woman in her 60s, and the difference between when she’s ill and not is so profound. After six or eight treatments, she’s living her life again. Suddenly her thoughts make sense. It’s one of the most dramatic treatments I’ve seen in medicine.”
“ECT is in many ways the closest psychiatry gets to laying on hands,” Sackheim, a psychology professor and researcher at Columbia University, says. “I have never seen a catatonic patient that didn’t have a profound improvement after a single session.”
But his name recognition as one of the top experts in the field has made him a target, he says: “If you look at Scientology’s most recent movie, a documentary in 2019, I’m the major villain in that thing.”
The documentary, Therapy or Torture: The Truth About Electroshock, does indeed featured Sackheim, but he is only one of a dozen medical figures who show up, most often in footage of depositions from the lawsuits against the device manufacturers.
“This is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a global organization dedicated to revealing the abusive and coercive practices of the psychiatric industry,” the film reveals at its opening.
What follows is a slick production, very consistent with Scientology’s other recent films that show up on its DirecTV channel, that says ECT puts a dangerous amount of voltage into a patient’s brain, resulting in permanent brain damage.
Sackheim and other providers say that isn’t true, and they point out that Scientology’s obsession with psychiatry and ECT in particular goes back to its founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
“Hubbard had a chip on his shoulder about psychiatry,” Sackheim says.
In 1947, after his disappointing experience as a Navy lieutenant in the Second World War left him hospitalized with bursitis and pinkeye (he never saw actual combat), Hubbard sent a letter to the VA begging for psychiatric care.
“This is a request for treatment… After trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life, I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psycho-analyst… I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations, and have newly come to realize that I must first triumph above this before I can hope to rehabilitation myself at all… Would you please help me?”
He didn’t get the care he was seeking. And then, only two years later, Hubbard was sending around a manuscript to the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, claiming that he had become the first person in 50,000 years to discover how the human mind works. He was dismissed as a crank, which he never forgot.
A year later, his manuscript was published as a bestselling book that changed his life completely. “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health” became a phenomenon when it debuted in May 1950, and began a movement that a couple of years later he renamed “Scientology.”
To this day, Scientology, based on Hubbard’s writings, considers psychiatry to be the most evil force in the universe. And in writings only meant for Scientologists, Hubbard claimed that psychiatry has been around for trillions of years. (Cosmologists estimate the universe’s age at about 13 billion years, and psychiatry emerged only in the late 19th century.)
In Hubbard’s cosmology, based on hundreds of lectures he gave over decades and many books that he authored, we are all immortal beings he called “thetans” which have lived countless times. Over that span, which he referred to as our “Whole Track,” we have lost sight of who we were and how powerful we were in the past. Only through Scientology counseling, Hubbard claimed, could we recover memories of our entire Whole Track and regain godlike abilities.
Part of the reason we had lost sight of that powerful past, he argued, was the interference of “evil psychs” who had implanted our minds with booby-traps going back trillions of years.
So for that reason, former top-level Scientology executive Mike Rinder explains, Hubbard had targeted electroconvulsive therapy as particularly forbidden for Scientologists.
“It is an article of faith in Scientology that ECT is barbaric,” Rinder says. “Using electricity to alter behavior is what psychs have done on the Whole Track for eons. Hubbard claims that this is how you capture and control thetans—with electricity. Never mind that it makes no sense, because thetans are not part of the physical universe. Scientologists would laugh at the idea of tying down thetans with ropes or chains, but they accept that electricity can accomplish this and has been the tool of the psychs for eons. So, the fact that the current ECT is safer is irrelevant.”
In public, however, when Scientology attacks psychiatry with the use of its front group CCHR, it avoids talking about “thetans” or “Whole Track” memories. Instead, it attacks ECT because even its biggest proponents have admitted that they weren’t sure why it is so effective.
New studies, however, may be providing an answer to that question. In November, researchers at UC San Diego reported findings which suggested that the seizures induced by ECT increase something called “aperiodic activity” in the brain, which has been described as the brain’s “background noise.”
“We’re now seeing that this activity actually has an important role in the brain, and we think electroconvulsive therapy helps restore this function in people with depression,” UC San Diego’s Sydney Smith told Science Daily when the studies became public.
Like other national figures in ECT who described their backgrounds in the field, Dr. Ziad Nahas, vice chair of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota medical school, says he has had to deal with Scientology’s ongoing interference with his work.
“A couple of years ago, I had a patient committed. He was a very psychotic patient, and he had been committed by the court to receive ECT,” Nahas told me by phone. “He had a mother who was also psychotic, and they managed to send these petitions and we started getting quite a bit of harassment with the community that is affiliated with Scientology. I was medical director and I had to ask the physician, who was no longer willing, to step aside and I took over the case, and they started directing the harassment at me. They were sending letters to the governor, and they created a stressful environment. Security had to be called in. And legal had to get involved.”
Nahas says that Scientology’s influence is not only making things very hard on the device manufacturers, but is also felt in the community of people delivering the therapy. “Their approach is to drive ECT devices out of business, but they have also managed to harass clinicians as well. And so there are fewer willing to do it,” he says.
Both Nahas and Sackheim also acknowledge that ECT has evolved over time is simply not the same treatment that Scientology is portraying from the 1950s.
“Back in 1979, the average time for a patient to know their name, following the treatment, was six to eight hours. Over half of them stopped prematurely because they were so confused,” Sackheim says. “Today, after a series of innovations to stimulation—virtually all at Columbia— now it’s 10 minutes. And with the newest stuff being tested, it’s down to six minutes.”
In March, Dr. Conrad Swartz, the CEO of Somatics, published a lengthy article arguing that the term “brain damage” itself is a colloquial expression, not a scientific term, that Scientology uses to confuse the public.
Doctors study brain injury, not brain damage, he explained, and studies have shown again and again that ECT devices like those manufactured by Somatics and SigmaStim do not cause brain injury. “There is no evidence of permanent structural changes or brain cell injury following ECT,” Swartz wrote.
In 2021, the FDA downgraded the risk level of ECT devices from Class 3 to Class 2, a move that CCHR had fought bitterly for years. Scientology’s in-house counsel Kendrick Moxon led a lawsuit against the FDA for making the change. The FDA responded by filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in October, and the court has not yet ruled on it.
Scientology’s controversies have received more media attention than ever in recent years, thanks to figures like Leah Remini, the King of Queens actress who was a Scientologist for more than 30 years and denounced Scientology on her A&E series Scientology and the Aftermath.
But Remini’s show and documentaries like Alex Gibney’s 2015 HBO film Going Clear have tended to focus on the alleged abuses of Scientology against Scientologists themselves.
Kettering and Sackheim and the other ECT figures point out that Scientology in this case is poised to deny life-saving therapy from hundreds of thousands of non-Scientologists, people who are suffering some of the worst effects of serious mental illnesses and may never have even heard of L. Ron Hubbard or his “technology” of the mind.
“The loss of MECTA [SigmaStim] and Somatics would be a disaster,” Dr. Vaughn McCall, chair at the Medical College of Georgia’s psychiatry department and a prominent national figure in ECT, says. “As with GM and Ford, probably neither would be unhappy if the other went out of business. But that’s not the goal here. The point being, we can’t afford to let either company go out of business.”
On top of that, he adds, “Scientology doesn’t seem to be interested in winning any of these lawsuits.”
““It’s a very strategic move by Scientology. It’s what they’re known for. And it’s a strange circumstance to be in. They’re going to be taking away a treatment that is saving so many lives.””
— Adrian Kettering, SigmaStim
He and Kettering and others argue that the point of the litigation seems merely to wear down the device manufacturers with costs. When the cases actually go to trial, the manufacturers usually win them pretty easily. But he and others pointed out that in a Florida lawsuit in 2018, Somatics took a serious hit.
“Somatics agreed to put some language in the device information that conceded that ECT could cause problems,” McCall explains.
“They managed to get Somatics to write in its manual that it causes brain damage without any proof that it does,” Dr. Ziad Nahas adds, echoing others who said the settlement set a bad precedent.
Somatics itself, in its most recent product manual for its ECT device, the Thymatron System IV, found a way to fight back, at least in a footnote: “In the interests of avoiding litigation we provide here our warning that Scientology and its affiliate CCHR have threatened to sue ECT device makers and psychiatrists in the USA who do not deliver a warning that ECT can cause brain damage, regardless of any evidence about it.”
“Other than that, these companies have succeeded, but at great cost,” McCall says. “The M.O. from Scientology seems to be to file as many suits as possible and ratchet up costs until it breaks the bank.”
Adrian Kettering admits that it is a battle that has taken its toll on her and her company.
“These are small companies chugging along,” she says. “It’s a very strategic move by Scientology. It’s what they’re known for. And it’s a strange circumstance to be in. They’re going to be taking away a treatment that is saving so many lives.”
Kettering says that providers are constantly reaching out to her, asking her how they can do something to counter Scientology’s attacks. “All of these doctors, they”re trying to figure it out. Should they make an appeal to Congress? To the FDA? To the APA? How should we do this, they are asking,” she says.
With both companies struggling to survive, a new court ruling arrived this year that may tip the balance and allow Scientology to deliver the killing blow. On June 20, the California Supreme Court responded to a lawsuit brought by Scientologist lawyers Wisner and Baum by overturning a longstanding doctrine that had provided the device manufacturers with some legal protection.
The court overturned previous rulings which reasoned that if a device manufacturer communicated warnings about the risks of their products to doctors who passed them on to patients, those patients couldn’t sue the manufacturers for following their doctors’ advice.
Now, with the new ruling in a lawsuit against Somatics, the court decided that a patient could sue the manufacturer for not giving a stronger warning about risks, even if their doctor had recommended the procedure.
Kettering predicted that the ruling, while not proving that “brain damage” had actually occurred, would lead to even more lawsuits against Somatics and SigmaStim, and would be a catastrophe.
Tony Ortega is a journalist who was formerly the editor of The Village Voice and has written about Scientology since 1995. You can find more of his work at The Underground Bunker.
