Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard’s disdain for the psychiatric profession is well known. What’s not so obvious is how Hubbard came to despise those whose ideas he liberally borrowed from.
If you talk to a Scientologist about their loathing for the psychiatric profession, they might talk about the over-use of psychotropic drugs or share their discomfort with electroshock therapy or the profession’s history of questionable ‘therapies,’ lobotomies, et al. This seems reasonable, to a degree. Looking further, one sees assertions that psychiatric “abuses” in their eyes are not aberrations, but part of a large conspiracy within the profession.
This rabbit hole goes pretty deep. Really deep. Hubbard’s troubles with Psychiatry began when he first sought approval for his first draft of Dianetics, which he submitted to the American Journal of Psychiatry. The article was roundly rejected, and eventually published in Astounding Science Fiction, and was met with derision from the Psychiatric community.
As Hubbard’s paranoia increased, so did his suspicion of psychiatry. At some point, he decided, they must be hiding some agenda (a belief Hubbard eventually applied to anyone who opposed his ideas). Scientology claims Hubbard “researched” psychiatry, discovering “abuses,” but Hubbard eventually worked psychiatry into a bizarre cosmological fantasy whereby ancient psychiatrists aided and abetted the enslavement of the souls that would eventually become the human race. So when the question comes up why Scientologists despise an entire profession, this is why- they literally believe an entire branch of medicine is an oppressive, demonic force for evil, which is part of a yet larger conspiracy to enslave humanity.
