Modern Mental Health

Throughout the years, I have been a Course Room Administrator at Hubbard Business College, as in L. Ron Hubbard, and I studied philosophy of mind, as well as psychology, at Lake County College, followed by Northeastern Illinois University. So, having had these experiences, and many others, I’ve come to understand a great deal about Scientology and psychiatry, along the way. More to the point, I’m well-versed in both Dianetics and the DSM, which makes me fairly well qualified to compare and contrast the two. The reality is that, they both only get it part right, and I wouldn’t even say half. The mind is a very complex thing, with lots of different features, so finding an adequate solution to what philosophers call the “hard problem” isn’t going to be easy. There are things that can be gained from either approach to mental health, Scientology or psychiatry. Contrary to what they both espouse, these are not mutually exclusive methodologies.
The way I see it, one major problem with Dianetics is that it can never be amended, unlike the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is now on the fifth version of the manuscript. In fact, having been trained with the DSM-IV, I simply couldn’t wait for the release of the DSM-V, which I’ve had on my desktop ever since it first came out in 2013. The critical difference between the DSM and Dianetics is that while they may both be wrong about a whole lot of things, only the DSM will ever change. This is very important, because the pathologizing of the human condition can often lead to harmful labels. Not that long ago, homosexuality was considered a full-blown mental illness, but thankfully psychiatrists have changed their minds on this, and for good reason. The important thing to note is that, provisionality is a critical part of the scientific method. This is why it’s terribly unfortunate that L. Ron Hubbard’s good ideas will never actually make their way out of Scientology. Similarly, they will never be further developed in any way. This is really quite sad, because he was right about a few different things, but his genius in that regard is always dismissed as a result of everything else he claimed. Ultimately, this is why academics just reject his work entirely.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes one is right and the other is wrong. For instance, Scientologists believe in an immortal soul that reincarnates. In contrast to this, psychiatrists believe that the mortal mind is nothing more than what the brain does. They claim that subjective consciousness is somehow just a result of the electrochemistry in our central nervous systems. Furthermore, as if to disprove their own argument without even realizing it, doctors will turn to the PDR for ailments in the body, but they have to look in the DSM to fully deal with disorders of the mind. This wouldn’t be the case if the materialist reductionists were right, and the mind were nothing more than biological epiphenomena. Granted, things like drug interactions prove that the body and soul are very much interconnected, but that’s altogether different than saying that the mind is purely physical. In reality, there’s no way to actually touch or see anxiety, like you can with a tumor. Disorders like ADHD and PTSD are intangible.
The fact of the matter is that a female who feels like a man might actually be identifying with the gender of their previous incarnation, then again maybe it has to do with their hormones, or both, or something altogether different. Similarly, someone that suffers from boanthropy may have actually been a cow in a past life. In instances like these, a shrink, or even a surgeon, would be of little or no use. People like this need something more akin to a shaman. Children who have past life memories that they can’t come to terms with are dismissed by psychiatrists as being liars, or worse yet crazy. Meanwhile, Scientologist only help members of the Church. In most countries there’s really no place for kids like this