It is neither overstatement nor a cliché to say, if you are looking for the greatest evil on Earth, look no further than psychiatry.”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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.”, 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.
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.
So for that reason, former top-level Scientology executive Mike Rinder explains, Hubbard had targeted electroconvulsive therapy as particularly forbidden for Scientologists. 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.
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. “Somatics agreed to put some language in the device information that conceded that ECT could cause problems,” McCall explains.