Published by the Church of Scientology International

f there is any truth to the premise forwarded by the psychiatric industry that criminality is an illness, the evidence shows that such an “illness” exists only in the sense that it is iatrogenic—i.e., caused or aggravated by psychiatric treatment itself.

	The criminality “illness” is a myth that serves as a cash cow supporting the psychiatric industry.

But instead of investigating mounting reports that psychiatric treatments may actually be increasing crime, and particularly violent crime, the World Health Organization in 1996 added violent crimes to its list of “medical illnesses” with a call to “initiate public health activities to address the problem.” Others hopped on the cash-filled bandwagon, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which cited “violent and abusive behavior” as a priority in its publication, “Healthy People 2000.”

Perpetuating the myth continues to be profitable, with psychiatrists, psychologists and other researchers lining up at the federal trough for money to study the “illness.” An Internet search by Freedom revealed that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued 303 grants in a two-year period between 1998 and 2000 to study crime and violence.

Just how much this has cost the taxpayer is not known, as the NIH no longer publishes the amounts of individual grant awards on its Internet data base. Lawrence Morton, spokesperson for NIH’s Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP) database, told Freedom, “We took the dollars out because the dollars can be misused and misunderstood.”

While well-funded cogs in the research machine issue papers and press releases on the latest theories, no research has yet resulted in psychiatrists being able to predict or prevent criminal behavior. This was confirmed at an August 1999 national summit on violent crime in Denver, when dozens of top experts on violent behavior met and discussed the latest research on the subject. While they discussed various tools and methods of assessment, they concurred it was impossible to accurately predict who would become violent.

Ironically, the research machine is at least as much public relations as science, where the event of a grant being issued or a research project being under way is exploited with publicity to convey the idea that, indeed, the emperor does have clothes.

These psychiatrists rely on an unfortunate human trait with this tactic: A lie repeated often enough will eventually be perceived as truth. In this case, the criminality “illness” is a myth that serves as a cash cow supporting the psychiatric industry.