I've been asked many times "what's the difference between Scientology and psychiatry?" From my point of view, here are the main differences that I see in these two subjects:
During psychiatric counseling, the practitioner often will tell you what your problem is. You may be told you're not handling something correctly and given advice on how to handle it. You may be told your problem is based on some fear, and you may even be told what that fear is. At times you may conclude something about your life and your practitioner may disagree with your conclusion.
During Scientology counseling, you are NEVER told what your problem is. Your counselor will guide you to areas of your life that you can review and decide for yourself what's what. And most certainly, when you come up with some conclusion or realization about your life, your counselor will never disagree or dispute your realization. It's what you found out about your life and you are the best person to judge these things.
To a marked degree, psychiatry believes your problem to be the result of a chemical imbalance. The psychiatric profession has prescribed an enormous amount of drugs designed in some way to alter brain chemistry. The only problem with this approach is that no one has yet produced a test to measure chemical imbalance in the brain.
So without any way of measuring or testing chemical imbalance, why would you want to take very strong drugs that will alter your brain chemistry? Have you ever listened closely to the TV or radio ads (or read the fine print in the newspaper ads) for Zoloft, Celexa, Prozac and the many other psychiatric drugs on the market? The list of dangerous side effects takes more time to communicate than the ad itself.
Psychiatrists, when pressed, will also tell you there is no medical test or evidence to justify the many diseases they have come up with. Yes, I said "come up with" because that is how it happens. They get together, discuss their observations, and then come up with diseases. These diseases of course now need to be treated and drugs are the MAJOR treatment method in today's psychiatric profession.
But don't take my word for this, watch this short video...
A Scientology counselor will NEVER request or require that you take drugs of any kind.
Psychiatry has used electric shock, insulin shock and removal of portions of your brain as methods of "treatment." Just on a level of sheer common sense, do you consider running an incredibly strong current of electricity through a person's brain a form of treatment? Now I realize you're not an expert, but unfortunately neither are the folks who use this method of treating a human being. For more information on this, click here.
A Scientologist would NEVER resort to this type of brutality, and you will see Scientologists publicly condemning it.
Psychiatrists freely admit they are not able to cure anything. If you haven't seen the short video above, watch it now. You may be stunned to hear it in their own words.
In Scientology counseling, people routinely rid themselves of unwanted conditions. I should qualify what I mean by "rid themselves of"— I mean get rid of completely without ever coming back at any time. These kinds of results from Scientology counseling have been happening for many decades for millions of people.
The above are some of the main differences I have observed between psychiatry and Scientology. For more information on how and why Scientology works, click here.
(For more viewpoints on this post, click on the "Comments" link below)
This is an excellent article. It really nails the differences. There are a couple of other differences I'd add:
In Scientology you are treated as a unique individual. In psychiatry you are a set of symptoms that require a prescription.
In Scientology each counseling session has a goal and it continues uninterrupted until that goal is achieved. No one is allowed to interrupt a Scientology counseling session. The person being counseled is delving into very personal things and sometimes great concentration is needed. It can be upsetting to be interrupted, so there are no phones, no pagers and nothing else allowed in the room that could distract. In psychiatry there is a set amount of time for a session and when that time is up the session is over and the patient comes back next time. If, during the session, an important call comes in then the psychiatrist may take the call. This could be upsetting for the patient if they were in the middle of saying something important.
Finally in Scientology we don't regard the person as having something wrong with him or her. We are making the able more able. In psychiatry the person is looked upon as mentally ill, as having something wrong with him or her. All the terms describing psychiatric conditions are negative. There is no concept that a person can achieve a higher ability or become more able.
That's just a couple more differences that come to mind.
Posted by: Grahame | July 01, 2008 at 12:58 PM
Psychiatry would not exist without government support. Scientology has never received any government assistance.
Posted by: Alan Eames | July 02, 2008 at 12:26 PM
I agree that the article and additional comments above are excellent. Here is something I would add.
The fundamental difference between Scientology and psychiatry is the premise upon which the individual is defined or viewed.
In psychiatry / psychology the individual is a material biological object; a body. The source of all thought and action, the source of what psychiatry considers the "illusion" of awareness and life itself is a physical object, the organ we call the brain. From this premise, all "treatment" or "therapy" is addressed to the structure (physical or chemical) of the biological object, the animal, which is considered to be the person.
In Scientology the individual is not a body. The individual is an imortal being, a spirit, a soul who has a mind (not the brain) and his body is a possession. This premise is where the counseling begins and what the methods and procedures address. The respect for what a person is and what his potentials are is a crucial fundamental to all of the doctrines and philosophy of Scientology. It is sacrosanct and inviolable.
This fundamental difference of premise, spiritual vs. material, leads to conclusions and thus actions, which are diametrically opposed.
As a side comment: One may ask, what is the brain then? The brain is an organ of the body; a physical collection of tissues which is a biological electrochemical switchboard that interfaces the mind (a contruct of energy) with the body.
Posted by: Adam Hancock | July 02, 2008 at 03:08 PM
Thank you Graham, Alan and Adam!
There is indeed a huge disparity between psychiatry and Scientology — in their methods and, more basically, how they view the individual.
Psychiatry has had its hand in so many sectors of human life (personal development, education, justice, the workplace, etc.) and has not performed well across the boards. They claim "expert status" but often do more harm than good. It is not only Scientologists who are aware of this fact. Many people are awakening to the fact (or have known for some time) that psychiatry does not offer real solutions for human endeavor.
I have been asked at times why Scientologists have a low opinion of psychiatry. In my post at http://www.afreshopinion.com/2006/08/why_do_some_sci.html — I try to answer this question.
Posted by: Stan Dubin | July 02, 2008 at 03:42 PM
A Scientology minister, when counseling a person, is working with an immortal spiritual being to help him or her become more able.
In many, many hours of receiving such counseling, I have never had a Scientology minister ever try to tell me what to think about anything.
The end result of a Scientology session is a happier, more able person. Every time, every session, that's the goal. And it is achieved in almost every session.
What's the goal of a psychiatry session? Normalcy? Being told what to think? To figure out what drug to prescribe to change brain chemistry based on some fad theory with no basis in science?
Scientologists deal with the being, the spirit.
More and more, psychiatry seems to deal only with brain chemistry. Their attempts at behavior modification are frightening and often result in violence -- witness all the school shootings where their patients are in therapy, taking a cocktail of powerful drugs that seek to shut down what a person feels. If you shut down a person's conscience with a psych drug, is it any wonder that he then goes out and shoots up a school?
I remember first starting out getting Scientology counseling over three decades ago, being afraid of counseling in general because of a confusion between what a Scientology minister was doing and what a psychiatrist might do. At first I was cautious and cagey with my answers, because I feared they might be used against me somehow. That has never happened. Scientology counseling is an amazing and incredibly helpful and validative process. It helps a person understand himself, why he does what he does, and how he can improve himself in his own estimation, without being told what to think or how to feel.
I thank God for Scientology -- as the Rev. Alfreddy Jackson said, "Thank God for putting L Ron Hubbard on this earth to help people."
Posted by: Jere | July 02, 2008 at 06:45 PM
Two differences come to mind:
In Scientology people are EXPECTED to improve and get better. And to stay better once some ability has been achieved. Psychiatry calls conditions "life-long" and there are statements that drugs will have to be taken for the rest of someone's life.
The other difference is that Scientology can be learned by anyone who wants to pick up a book, read it and apply it. The basics of why it works are learnable by anyone who wants to find out. The texts were written for anybody, and have been translated into a lot of languages, and have great glossaries. Psychiatric texts are "double-plus-good-duckspeak." Don't say much, and take a lot of paper to do it. (really, I took a couple semisters - the text didn't even agree with itself from one chapter to another.)
Posted by: Zeth | July 02, 2008 at 10:24 PM
I was not able (even after several attempts) to subscribe - due to the code-entering procedure...and I don't know why.
tks
Cecile
PS I think you website is cool !
Posted by: Cecile Vowles | July 07, 2008 at 05:50 AM
I so agree with what you state herein.
Here is a portion of an article I wrote some time ago.
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The biggest part of being honest with yourself is simply being willing to look.
Practice it.
If you find yourself struggling and getting nowhere then seek out some one you truly trust and talk to them about it.
A word of caution on this point:
NEVER discuss your case (personal reactions to and mysteries about your responses to life) with someone who tells you what you should realize, or think about your views.
Do not discuss your personal case with someone who specializes in telling a person HOW they should be thinking, or WHY you should consider those things troubling you to be “NORMAL.”
The fact is that there is no such authority anywhere.
No college on earth or anywhere else can enable a person to sit down with another and tell him or her what to think about their case or what's wrong about the function of their mind.
Schools can't do this because it is not something that they are supposed to do. School is there to provide information for you to think with. Schools should specialize in the accuracy of data they export and the consistency of predictable result from application of that data.
In fact, in my opinion, the method by which one can determine the actual quality of an educational institution is by the accuracy of its data in obtaining a specified quality of result.
At the time of this writing they DO NOT do this. Many of the renowned schools of today have been poisoned into being a clearing house for political agenda. This should be a constitutionally ratified CRIME addressed by charges of treason.
There is nothing wrong with your mind. It is already functioning quite well. The only valid realization is one that you discover for yourself.
There is not one person on earth that can TELL anyone what they must realize when they look into themselves.
Talk to someone who can listen.
Talk to someone who can ask questions that help you look.
Talk to some one who will let you speak your mind without interrupting you or arguing with what you say.
Find someone who will not take what you tell them about you as something personal to them.
Handling things that interfere with your thinking is a subject where the correct answers always come from you.
A person who specializes in helping you in this area will know how to ask the needed questions so that you can get the answers.
There are very special people trained to do just that.
They are NOT psychologists, or psychiatrists.
These two practices have been at it for over a hundred and forty years.
To this day they get, only a partial result.
In order to declare a satisfactory result, the authorities therein had to redefine the measure of “satisfactory”. It is monitored by a political agenda and not a predictable regularity.
Even their own practitioners state that instead of a science these activities are based upon opinions.
They allow the telling of someone what is wrong with them.
You are going to run into people who feel “offended” that I present this viewpoint.
It is unfortunate that they feel “offended”. Perhaps they learned how to do so by association with the above. My viewpoint is formed from first hand observation in the results.
The results of psychology and psychiatry have shown themselves (psychology and psychiatry) to be degeneratively destructive in their result. Instead of actually getting to the root of someone’s “disaligned behavior” ( I specifically chose that exact wording ) a prescribed behavior is determined after which medical means are used to obtain it. Here again we find the attempt of an outside agency working to install their definition or “normal” or “who yourself must be”
At best the practitioners simply satisfy their own need to have someone agree with them.
In my view, it is not that they are “bad” or “evil”
but have had the unfortunate task of extensive training in a subject that produces an insufficiently beneficial result.
These people need help!
Posted by: J. Nathan Fletcher | July 08, 2008 at 10:14 AM