Published by the Church of Scientology International

A Uniquely Human Desire

Today’s youth reap the disastrous effects of psychiatry’s efforts to balance the mythical “chemical imbalance.”

The original members of the ACNP were hand-picked by psychiatrist Robert Felix, first director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

In December 1967’s Psychopharmacology Bulletin, published by the NIMH, Kline wrote, “Man is an animal impelled by internal forces to act. Just what form that action will take depends on the sensations experienced, the learned modifications of innate response patterns, and the possible alternatives existing in the immediate environmental situation.”

Although for psychiatrists, man is and evidently always will be an animal, Kline claimed one feature separated humanity from others in the animal kingdom: the desire to take pills. The psychiatric industry was eager to satisfy that desire.

That same year, Kline co-authored a report from a section of the ACNP called the Study Group for the Effects of Psychotropic Drugs on Normal Humans.

The report stated, “If we accept the position that human mood, motivation and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid, expedient means to produce any desired neurochemical state that we wish. The sooner that we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can rationally consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to be able to provide for people.” (Emphasis added.)

The report concluded, “the present breadth of drug use may be almost trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life in the year 2000.”

“Normalizing” Children with LSD and Speed

One of the leading government experts on “mind control,” Nathan Kline, stated exactly what psychiatry intended to do: 1. Make drug use for controlling daily life common and 2. Develop more drugs to control even more aspects of people’s lives.

And so, one of the leading government experts on “mind control,” Nathan Kline, stated exactly what psychiatry intended to do, and what it has strived to do for more than three decades: 1) make drug use for controlling daily life common and morally acceptable and 2) develop more drugs to control even more aspects of people’s lives.

Broad-based social control and behavior modification were justified under the banner of “science.”

Psychiatry and psychology refer to behavioral control through chemicals as “normalizing” the individual. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychiatrists attempted to “normalize” children and adults with such drugs as LSD and amphetamines.

In the 1970s, amphetamines and other drugs began to pour into America’s schools and, in the years since, drug abuse has risen, as have crime and violence, while scholastic achievement scores have plunged out the bottom.

While the statistics are horrifying, the true cost in human terms — the virtual annihilation of hope and the future for the nation’s children — is beyond calculation.

Just as a person who turns to drugs to solve a problem sooner or later finds the solution has become the problem, so it is with psychiatry and psychology in the schools. Instead of solving a problem, they became the source of new ones.

“No One Owns His Own Personality”

In 1971, two of Nathan Kline’s colleagues, psychiatrist Daniel Freedman, who experimented with LSD and mescaline, and psychopharmacologist Conan Kortensky, served as members of the ACNP’s six-man study group, along with NIMH psychiatrist Jonathan O. Cole.

Freedman and Kortensky also sat as members of a Department of Health, Education and Welfare panel that approved the use of amphetamines for children with “behavioral problems.” Freedman served as panel chairman. A Freedman cohort, psychiatrist Werner Koella, worked in the psychopharmacology research division of methylphenidate’s manufacturer.

The key players were in place to ensure psychiatric drugs were pushed into classrooms to “control” children.

In 1970, behavioral psychologist James V. McConnell, editor and publisher of The Journal of Biological Psychology, said that the goal of behavioral psychologists was to “reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do.”

Thus, coincident with education’s decline in America, psychiatrists and psychologists were spearheading the use of what McConnell called “positive brainwashing” combined with drugs and “the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual’s behavior.” Arguing that “man is only an animal,” he stated, “in effect, we have but two means of educating people or rats ... we can either reward them ... or punish them.”

McConnell’s words reveal the dehumanizing essence of psychology: “Many cling to the old-fashioned belief that each of us builds up his personality by free will. This is as patently incorrect as the belief that the world is flat. No one owns his own personality. Your ego or individuality was forced on you by your genetic constitution and by the society into which you were born. You had no say about what kind of personality you acquired, and there’s no reason to believe you should have the right to refuse to acquire a new personality.”

In 1971, psychiatrist Paul Wender stated that stimulants in general, and methylphenidate in particular, could increase the susceptibility to conditioning in humans.

Schoolchildren could now be conditioned as B.F. Skinner had envisioned — but only after their “brain chemistry” had been balanced.

Thirty-plus years later, the next generation has reaped the disastrous and tragic effects of psychiatry’s effort to balance the mythical “chemical imbalance.”