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Igor4sugry

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Most of our comments are about positive things here. But I have run into a website psychsearch.net after an article on a psychiatrist in our area who murdered a pregnant woman. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...in-answered-Craigslist-ad-attacked-women.html
This guy worked in local ED as a psychiatrist.

Just surprised that there is a dedicated site to crimes by those in our profession. Some saying that psychiatrist have higher % of crimes in terms of other physicians.
I'm not sure what is driving this.

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At first I thought it must have been the CCHR report form (run by Scientology), but this one appears different and to not lists its affiliation. Scientologists believe that suppressive people (which would include psychiatrists at the top of the list) always have a history of crimes if you look for them.

Unfortunately for Scientology and patients and good doctors, I will say that in my experience reporting serious allegations to the state (in my case Virginia) regarding a psychiatrist results in no action being taken. I am thinking of one psychiatrist in particular whom I reported for abuse, and whom I know many others have as well. In fact, I was encouraged by the psychiatrist I saw after this psychiatrist to report him. It's quite unbelievable to me some of the places that are allowed to stay open, but then I look at the Judge Rotenberg Center and I see anything is possible. It's an "alternative" placement where children with severe autism are repeatedly electrically shocked on the skin (not ECT)—they are forced to wear backpacks 24 hours a day that contain enough voltage to remotely shock them. A video was released in a trial where a boy was motionless on the floor and repeatedly shocked for hours. He suffered brain damage. It makes my blood curdle to even think about it too much. It was named after the judge who ruled it could stay open. People wonder how the concentration camps could have run without outrage—I ask the same question about the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Anyhow, that was a bit of a tangent. My point was that I have seen efforts like this before from the CCHR, but if you are a psychiatrist I wouldn't worry unless you actually kill someone, because it seems like anything goes.
 
According to a quick websearch, the creator of the site, Ken Kramer, is a Scientologist. More of the same.
 
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Just surprised that there is a dedicated site to crimes by those in our profession. Some saying that psychiatrist have higher % of crimes in terms of other physicians.
I'm not sure what is driving this.

Sources please. You're making some giant leaps and assumptions here without any support. I could say "Some say neurologists have a higher % of crimes." Your statement "I'm not sure what is driving this" assumes your assumption is true.

I've never heard anything about psychiatry committing more crimes than other specialties. Don't be a fool and buy into propaganda.
 
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Scientologists are idiots. They call psychologists and psychiatrists "evil" because we help people with mental illness, yet they brainwash their members and attempt to influence their thoughts. Hypocrites I tell you... who deserve to be shipped off to planet Mars.

Here's a little insight to the idiocy of scientology. One time one of their members became psychotic, and other scinetologists pulled her from a psych hospital against medical advice. They thought they knew more than doctors.
They treated her for days with vitamins and chicken broth using a turkey baster. Guess what happened to her. She died. Just like their "religion" - dead.
 
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Scientologists are idiots. They call psychologists and psychiatrists "evil" because we help people with mental illness, yet they brainwash their members and attempt to influence their thoughts. Hypocrites I tell you... who deserve to be shipped off to planet Mars.

Here's a little insight to the idiocy of scientology. One time one of their members became psychotic, and other scinetologists pulled her from a psych hospital against medical advice. They thought they knew more than doctors.
They treated her for days with vitamins and chicken broth using a turkey baster. Guess what happened to her. She died. Just like their "religion" - dead.

It doesn't help just to call it idiocy. NRMs (new religious movements) are fed on the belief that people are against them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that the public constantly helps them out with. And I do not agree that all Scientologists are idiots. There are children who are born into that organization. I think the organization itself is criminal. But I don't think you can make a sweeping generalization of the people in it, nor do I think it's helpful even if it were true.
 
Just surprised that there is a dedicated site to crimes by those in our profession. Some saying that psychiatrist have higher % of crimes in terms of other physicians.
I'm not sure what is driving this.

According to a quick websearch, the creator of the site, Ken Kramer, is a Scientologist. More of the same.

The majority of so called 'Angel of Mercy' serial killers are Nurses, so where are all the sites against Nursing? Oh, that's right, Scientology doesn't believe that Nurses were part of some intergalactic conspiracy lead by an alien called Xenu.
 
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I have seen efforts like this before from the CCHR, but if you are a psychiatrist I wouldn't worry unless you actually kill someone, because it seems like anything goes.

I don't think that's very fair to the dedicated and caring professionals who post to this forum.
 
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But it is concerning that physicians are committing crimes. Including assault/rape/murder/drug-related charges. This is something that is not talked about in medical or residency training. I once had a patient who was getting medications from a clinic that was shut down, the doc was in newspaper too. Part of substance history I wrote that she was going to this clinic and the name of the doc. My attending told me to remove his name from the history section. His argument was that you never know who will accuse you of over prescribing. Feels like we avoid thinking of these situations and poor decisions other DOs/MDs make.
 
But it is concerning that physicians are committing crimes. Including assault/rape/murder/drug-related charges. This is something that is not talked about in medical or residency training. I once had a patient who was getting medications from a clinic that was shut down, the doc was in newspaper too. Part of substance history I wrote that she was going to this clinic and the name of the doc. My attending told me to remove his name from the history section. His argument was that you never know who will accuse you of over prescribing. Feels like we avoid thinking of these situations and poor decisions other DOs/MDs make.

There is nothing about the screening process for medical school or residency that screens out sociopathy, aside from a criminal background check. Assuming a natural distribution of traits and sheer randomness of other factors, there will of course be some in the medical profession that commit crimes. Now if we want to discuss factors that select FOR sociopathic traits in areas of medicine, that's something else.
 
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There is nothing about the screening process for medical school or residency that screens out sociopathy, aside from a criminal background check.

Agree, kinda. There are tools we could employ but their level of inaccuracy are to the degree where if we really employed them, without any corresponding behavior to match the test results, and did anything actionable, we'd be hurting several people that would score in the false (+) range. The level of accuracy we have with regards to testing is on the order of better than using nothing, but not much better than that.

Imagine being a student and kicked out or denied entry from medical school from a test with that level of accuracy (or lack thereof). You'd be throwing almost as many innocent people out with the evil ones.

There's also the Orwellian argument even if our testing methods did get better. For example, fMRIs may possibly be more accurate lie detectors than the conventional ones though the data is still being researched (with some data suggesting it shouldn't be relied upon). There's going to be a faction of people, understandably, that will be against condemning a person for not even yet doing the behavior.
 
We may hear about the murders and rapes, which are on face value unethical, but the issues that are more germane are the ones we face every day, such as those grey areas like religion. For example, what do you do when a patient asks you to pray for them? As psychiatrists we are tempted to cross into grey ethical areas all the time.
 
Yeah. It's especially tempting to ignore a patient who falls and breaks a hip, getting a secretary to call 911 and then dancing in the waiting room while the patient is being wheeled out by paramedics.

Or, rather than debate a question where each side has already made its point, we could discuss more relevant things, such as what the OP brought up. My take on what the OP said, since you seemed to only look at what I wrote weeks ago in another thread and not here, is that rapes and murders make the news, but they're not the questions we should be battling. It's legitimate to comment on that, disagree with it, etc., but the incident you are referring to had more than enough commentary already.
 
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We may hear about the murders and rapes, which are on face value unethical, but the issues that are more germane are the ones we face every day, such as those grey areas like religion. For example, what do you do when a patient asks you to pray for them? As psychiatrists we are tempted to cross into grey ethical areas all the time.
Wait, did you just say 'on face value' when it comes to murder and rape being unethical? :wtf:

On face value? on face value? ON FACE VALUE?!!! :bang:

No, not on 'face value', by every single decent value a human being should possess.

And yeah, being able to engage in what I would assume is Psych 101 and acknowledge your patient's needs without compounding their issues and/or compromising your own beliefs is totally moving into the shadowy grey area of ethics - leaving a patient lying on the floor with a broken hip whilst you dance on the other hand...:eyebrow:
 
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Back to the OP. Many patients are angered by the mental health field for a variety of reasons. Some more legitimate than others, of course, nevertheless I believe that frustration is what fuels a lot of the anti-psychiatry/psychology/treatment websites. Also, just look at the posted comments section in any media article on mental health treatment and you will see and hear that same frustration. It's usually about 20% the anti-medical everything loons, 20% diet and exercise will fix ya, 20% political debate, 30% "I was screwed by this quack", and 10% "After years of quacks, this doctor saved my life."
Some of those numbers could be improved, IMO.
 
Scientology has accused psychiatry of making the Nazis evil, as if they were innocent babes before we got our hands on them, orchestrating 9/11 because a high-ranking Taliban is a surgeon (repeat-surgeon, not a psychiatrist), and having meetings were we plan on molesting children.

The above is not made up. If you check their video, Psychiatry, An Industry of Death you'll see it before your very own eyes.

Then in the same breath, they claim we have no ability to do anything because as they claim, psychiatry is just quackery, yet at the same time we are so crafty as to do everything in the world that has gone wrong.
 
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The scientologists are way out there, of course, but there are plenty of criticisms of our field that are more justified. I guess I wonder if we are doing a worse job or getting more criticism than the other fields of medicine? Someone should do a study on it.
 
The scientologists are way out there, of course, but there are plenty of criticisms of our field that are more justified. I guess I wonder if we are doing a worse job or getting more criticism than the other fields of medicine? Someone should do a study on it.

It's pretty tough to define who is doing a "worse job" though. Is it worse to be a neurosurgeon and paralyze one person, or be a cardiologist and unnecessarily stent a healthy person, be a radiologist and miss an epidural hematoma and indirectly cause a death, or treat 30 people with depression inadequately? Discharge someone early only to have them commit suicide or do unnecessary holds on 30 people against their will with no ultimate benefit to them? It's hard enough to come up with good quality metrics within a field let alone the likely impossible task of comparing performance across completely different fields.
 
The scientologists are way out there, of course, but there are plenty of criticisms of our field that are more justified. I guess I wonder if we are doing a worse job or getting more criticism than the other fields of medicine? Someone should do a study on it.

I’m fairly sure proctologists have stayed out of the fray more successfully than we have, crafty as they are. I have it on good authority they were behind the demise of little Miss Sunshine.
 
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Back to the OP. Many patients are angered by the mental health field for a variety of reasons. Some more legitimate than others, of course, nevertheless I believe that frustration is what fuels a lot of the anti-psychiatry/psychology/treatment websites. Also, just look at the posted comments section in any media article on mental health treatment and you will see and hear that same frustration. It's usually about 20% the anti-medical everything loons, 20% diet and exercise will fix ya, 20% political debate, 30% "I was screwed by this quack", and 10% "After years of quacks, this doctor saved my life."
Some of those numbers could be improved, IMO.

I think it's more than just frustration. I agree that is a part of it, but I know plenty of people who became disgruntled with the mental health care system, including myself, who didn't then go on to become anti psychiatry and advocate against the entire field. So it makes me wonder what it is about those in the anti psychiatry movement that makes things so different for them. Why do they take up the sword, so to speak, and go into battle with this amorphous creature they see as 'Psychiatry', whilst others who have also been let down or abuse by the system choose not to impart their own views onto others, or onto the field as a whole.

I do think what Birchswing said regarding incidents not being taken seriously enough when they are reported, or not being responded to at all might be one added layer to the anti psychiatry puzzle. You take someone who has already felt harmed, or been harmed, and then give that person little to no consideration or recourse to address that harm, and you've quite potentially left them wide open to the influences of the anti psychiatry movement, imho.

*thinks...* Okay, this will be the one and only time I will go into any sort of detail regarding my previous experience of abuse in therapy, and only because I believe it is pertinent to the topic at hand....

The Psychiatrist who abused me put many of his female patients, including myself, through a systematic grooming process that lasted anywhere from 12 months to 2 years, and involved tactics such as psychological manipulation, fear suggestion, isolation, and dependency, before the therapy was then gradually sexualised until a sexual relationship was eventually commenced. I consider myself one of the luckier ones, because thanks to a couple of incidents that occurred at the time I was able to break out of the almost cult like stranglehold this Doctor had on many of his patients, and leave before things went past a certain point. In my case the situation got as far as the early stages of some increasingly inappropriate touching, although nothing that was outright sexual, and a certain amount of sexually charged comments and/or language. Despite the fact that, strictly speaking, I wasn't sexually abused by this Psychiatrist, being put through close to a year's worth of psychological mind games and manipulation, along with the sexualisation of therapy that I did experience still left me with a truck load of trust and trauma issues (having someone get inside your head and mess with it like that can be incredibly damaging, as I'm sure you're more than aware).

Now because I felt as if my situation wasn't as severe as others, and because I didn't want to tie up any investigation with what might have been considered a 'frivolous complaint', I personally chose not to file a report, but I do know others who eventually did, including not just former patients, but family members as well. From what we were lead to believe the medical board had already been informed, via unofficial complaints and rumours, that something was amiss at the time the abuse was occurring, and they did nothing. Even after official complaints had been made it still took them another 4-5 years before any action was taken - the Psychiatrist in question was then eventually stripped of his medical licence. I believe the majority of us who had been through his so called 'care' breathed a huge sigh of relief when the final verdict came down...it might have taken a while, criminal charges might not have been bought against him, but at least he could no longer practice as a Psychiatrist, or as a Physician, and hurt any more vulnerable people out there. That was up until 2010/2011 when it was discovered by a group of former patients attempting to bring a civil suit against him that his license had been returned not less than three years later, and he had been allowed to recommence practicing (the only restriction being he not be involved in private practice), before eventually retiring in relative luxury to an undisclosed location overseas. So basically for putting patients through a calculated and systematic regime of psychological and sexual abuse (and in some cases outright raping them while they were under conscious sedation with no capacity to consent) he essentially ended up getting off with what amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist in my book.

Obviously finding out this new development I was very angry, and in many ways also felt doubly betrayed. Not only had the system appeared to fail to protect those most vulnerable, it seemed as if it were more concerned with protecting the overall reputation/careers of the perpetrators by doling out only the most perfunctory of punishments, and then promptly working to bring them back into the fold. In my case I've been fortunate enough that I've at least been able to begin to work through a lot of this with my current Psychiatrist, who I have come to trust implicitly. But what if that wasn't the case? What if after going through all of this instead of coming across someone in the mental health profession who I could learn to eventually trust, it was the anti psychiatry movement I came into contact with first?

In these types of cases I personally feel as if the failure of the boards (and/or whatever other organisations are involved) to act, or to act appropriately, is just as damaging, both to the patient and to the reputation of the Psychiatric profession overall, as is the abuse that occurred in the first place. You take an already victimised person, make them feel victimised all over again by failing to adequately address the cause of that victimisation, and then present them with a platform where they may very well feel as if they finally have a chance to be 'heard', and I can see how some people might be drawn to the anti psychiatry movement as a place for them to vent their anger (and more often than not their confusion as well). To my mind it still doesn't explain why many who go through the same, or similar experiences don't end up becoming anti the entire system, whilst others do, but looking at it based on my own first hand knowledge I can at least see how such things might occur.
 
At least you and the other patients saw some recourse being taken for abusive practices. I won't comment on whether it was too much or too little as I don't know all the facts. I think some of the difficulty in many of the cases is in proving the intent to harm. Most of my experience with poor clinical practices has been because of lack of competence or more frequently "dealing with the system". I have not seen much actual intentional harmful conduct or even heard about it from my patients. I did have one patient who was molested by a clinician but the patient did not know specifics of what happened with the slime-bucket after the legal proceedings and all.
 
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At least you and the other patients saw some recourse being taken for abusive practices. I won't comment on whether it was too much or too little as I don't know all the facts. I think some of the difficulty in many of the cases is in proving the intent to harm. Most of my experience with poor clinical practices has been because of lack of competence or more frequently "dealing with the system". I have not seen much actual intentional harmful conduct or even heard about it from my patients. I did have one patient who was molested by a clinician but the patient did not know specifics of what happened with the slime-bucket after the legal proceedings and all.

Sorry I should have made it a little clearer that most of the information myself, and other former patients who weren't directly involved in any of the complaints process, were able to ascertain came from a few news paper reports, and some online links/discussion. Apart from that though we weren't really given access to any sort of information on proceedings. I'm not sure if it was different for those who actually lodged official complaints themselves. And yes I suppose we did get at least some recourse, or at least what we did get was better than nothing at all. From an emotional standpoint though it's kind of hard to see that when you're the one who's been on the receiving end of the abuse, and your abuser has basically sailed off into the sunset. I certainly don't envy the job that a medical board has to do, I know there must be a lot of false complaints made against good Doctors so obviously they have to weight the validity of each complaint before rushing to make a judgement call that may ruin an innocent person's career and/or life. But having said that when you know the evidence being presented is good and proper, and you've been through that same shared personal experience with others that pretty much says 'you're dealing with a predator', and it ends up feeling like the board has erred on the side of caution and given your abuser at least some benefit of the doubt, then it can be very easy to become disillusioned with the entire system. I believe that may be one of the tipping points where someone would be most vulnerable to being drawn into the anti psychiatry movement's rhetoric. Like I said/indicated, I sometimes wonder how many of those involved in the anti psych movement (the true believers not withstanding) just want someone to hear them*. Again I am lucky that I have a good Psychiatrist who I can work through this sort of stuff with.

(*and of course then you obviously run into the problem of being heard by a group who are probably just going to throw more fuel onto the emotional fire, because it suits their agenda.)
 

Igor, I'm not sure what to make of these cases without a larger context. Granted, humans will do human things like commit crimes. It's hard to know what to make of these specific cases.

We could look at it from an entirely different perspective and say that doctors are more harshly treated by the criminal justice system using the exact same evidence, but obviously we can't conclude that either.

I will concede that in the field of medicine, there is a power differential, and doctors are largely trusted to make wise decisions and are given a good deal of discretion with very powerful tools (medicines). I saw a story not long ago about a doctor who set up shop in broad daylight in a Starbucks to prescribe narcotics. They caught him using hidden cameras. He was just giving people exactly what they asked for with no exam. It was just a drug deal. Someone who has achieved an MD and chooses to do that is an odd duck. There are other avenues to a fulfilling, profitable career than selling narcotics.

As someone who chose to go into the healing arts, it is my sincere hope that these criminal doctors can be rehabilitated and become positive forces with the skills they must have attained to have received an MD.
 
There's bad people in every field. When it's police officers, politicians, clergy, doctors, well any field where there's an intimate level of trust and if that trust is misplaced a world of hurt can happen the effects are especially worrisome.

People have a false notion that medschool weeds these things out. No it doesn't. There's no reason to believe it would either. Residencies are often times too scared to do much out of fear of being sued.
 
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The scientologists are way out there, of course, but there are plenty of criticisms of our field that are more justified. I guess I wonder if we are doing a worse job or getting more criticism than the other fields of medicine? Someone should do a study on it.

scientologists aren't the criticism that bothers us......they are wackos. everyone knows that, so some of us try to paint them as the main critics of us, which is bs. The reality is that a significant percentage of the professional class(both in and outside health care) views us as something between harmful and placebo......and that's the real problem. Not what tom cruise thinks
 
scientologists aren't the criticism that bothers us......they are wackos. everyone knows that, so some of us try to paint them as the main critics of us, which is bs. The reality is that a significant percentage of the professional class(both in and outside health care) views us as something between harmful and placebo......and that's the real problem. Not what tom cruise thinks

I just did a literature survey on government attitudes toward the Church of Scientology as part of a research proposal. Was quite interesting. My conclusion was that the UK has one of the better systems of regulating Scientology. I also think they do a better job than the US of regulating psychiatric prescriptions. The US is basically the wild west when it comes to both Scientology and psychiatry, IMO. We're the country that allows everything to every extreme until someone dies and then we put them in the harshest prison system or to death. Nothing in moderation. On the other hand, Germany is absolutely insane when it comes to Scientology and both their government and Scientology are vying for a prize in craziness. Edited to add: As an example of Germany, you have to reveal your allegiance to Scientology in applications for government jobs and some government jobs are not open to Scientologists. Scientologists cannot join any major political party. Germany is the fuel that helps Scientology convince its parishioners they are being targeted and discriminated against by "suppressive" which only makes them more and more insular. Interestingly, the US Department of State actively advocates for the rights of Scientologists in Germany and considers their treatment in Germany human rights violations.
 
Why should the government have a position against Scientology? Any more than say...the 700 club. Or the Catholic Church. Or whatever sheistery cult you'd like to put forth. The point of Jefferson's doctrine was that we each indulge in whatever we like without impinging on each other.

Declaring your personal beliefs as part of employment screen is a horrible idea. These things work both ways.

Scientologists have the right to pay 50 g's to the posterity of a science fiction guru to get...Clear. If it wasn't Scientology it'd be something else. Some people are just suckers. So what?
 
Why should the government have a position against Scientology? Any more than say...the 700 club. Or the Catholic Church. Or whatever sheistery cult you'd like to put forth. The point of Jefferson's doctrine was that we each indulge in whatever we like without impinging on each other.

Declaring your personal beliefs as part of employment screen is a horrible idea. These things work both ways.

Scientologists have the right to pay 50 g's to the posterity of a science fiction guru to get...Clear. If it wasn't Scientology it'd be something else. Some people are just suckers. So what?
It's actually quite interesting. In essence, Germany is terrified of losing its democracy. They have a term for anything that goes against the constitution (verfassungsfeindlich). Their constitution is written in a way that is much more concerned about the idea of democracy being very fragile. You have to remember that Germany's constitutional democracy is very young compared to the US's. They believe that it is possible for forces to infiltrate the government and use brain-washing techniques to turn Germany into an anti-democratic state (which seems a bit irrational unless you consider their relatively recent history). As such, they are more like to curtail freedoms than the US when they think people or organization pose a risk to democracy--which is somewhat ironic in a way, as you tend to associate democracy with freedom. The other difference is that Germany's constitution says that it seeks to cooperate with religious communities--not to separate from them. They have a good relationship with the large religious groups but much more difficulty with the ones that are very insular in nature (and NRMs tend to be by definition very insular).

The research I did on the UK and the US was more with regard to the level of confrontation between NRMs (new religious movements) and the government. The US tends to allow NRMs to develop unchecked but when it does confront them, the confrontations tend to be violent (the FBI invading Scientology offices, the Waco stand-off, etc.). In the UK, there is more involved regulation at an earlier level in people's personal lives, and so organizations like Scientology are allowed to exist, but the author I was reading argued that there are fewer extremes, both on the side of the government and NRMs. In the US, because we are so sparsely populated, Scientology can buy huge swaths of rural land and build military compounds. It's harder to do that in the UK. In the UK you have to sort of fit into normal culture--it's harder to separate and be very insular.
 
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It's actually quite interesting. In essence, Germany is terrified of losing its democracy. They have a term for anything that goes against the constitution (verfassungsfeindlich). Their constitution is written in a way that is much more concerned about the idea of democracy being very fragile. You have to remember that Germany's constitutional democracy is very young compared to the US's. They believe that it is possible for forces to infiltrate the government and use brain-washing techniques to turn Germany into an anti-democratic state (which seems a bit irrational unless you consider their relatively recent history). As such, they are more like to curtail freedoms than the US when they think people or organization pose a risk to democracy--which is somewhat ironic in a way, as you tend to associate democracy with freedom. The other difference is that Germany's constitution says that it seeks to cooperate with religious communities--not to separate from them. They have a good relationship with the large religious groups but much more difficulty with the ones that are very insular in nature (and NRMs tend to be by definition very insular).

The research I did on the UK and the US was more with regard to the level of confrontation between NRMs (new religious movements) and the government. The US tends to allow NRMs to develop unchecked but when it does confront them, the confrontations tend to be violent (the FBI invading Scientology offices, the Waco stand-off, etc.). In the UK, there is more involved regulation at an earlier level in people's personal lives, and so organizations like Scientology are allowed to exist, but the author I was reading argued that there are fewer extremes, both on the side of the government and NRMs. In the US, because we are so sparsely populated, Scientology can buy huge swaths of rural land and build military compounds. It's harder to do that in the UK. In the UK you have to sort of fit into normal culture--it's harder to separate and be very insular.

That is very interesting regarding the different ideas about role of government in such matters from one country to the next.

Unfortunately I think your author is way off the mark on his/her estimation of the relative concentration of extreme religious dogmas and insular communities. The UK is overrun with problems of Islamic extremist idealogues and the insularity that shelters them. Separate religious schools. Shariat law. Etc.

It is perhaps, in my opinion, only the prevalence and virulence of our own, less harmful and less violent, forms of fundamentalism--ie evangelical Christianity--that prevents expansion of these other problems here. Sad as it is to say for an atheist like myself. That and a more commercial culture less concerned with such notions. And also we adhere less strongly to the finatical forms multi-culturalism that celebrate the subjugation our citizens in the name of some vague morally superior and self-congratulating liberalism.

That we allow other minor cults to get their freak on by international comparison is more amusing than significant in terms of the problems presented.

It's one of the differences that makes me appreciate America over Europe. Although they have us beat on some things. This is not one of them.

They weren't forged by necessity from the same disparate constituencies. Religious and cultural.
 
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The research I did on the UK and the US was more with regard to the level of confrontation between NRMs (new religious movements) and the government. The US tends to allow NRMs to develop unchecked but when it does confront them, the confrontations tend to be violent (the FBI invading Scientology offices, the Waco stand-off, etc.). In the UK, there is more involved regulation at an earlier level in people's personal lives, and so organizations like Scientology are allowed to exist, but the author I was reading argued that there are fewer extremes, both on the side of the government and NRMs. In the US, because we are so sparsely populated, Scientology can buy huge swaths of rural land and build military compounds. It's harder to do that in the UK. In the UK you have to sort of fit into normal culture--it's harder to separate and be very insular.

Australia is similar to the UK, at least in the State that I live in. Anyone is free to believe, practice and live how they see fit (including setting up insular communities), so long as they adhere to the law, don't interfere with due political process (attempt to rig an election, for example), and they're not engaging in hate speech and/or incitations to violence towards other members of the community (they still have the right to express their opinions, they still have the right to express opinions that some might consider distasteful or extremist, but there's a limit as to how far that right to expression can go). Groups, whether operating as a group or as individuals within that group, also have to respect the rights of other citizens not to feel uncomfortable, or harassed. So, for example, Scientologists are allowed to practice and engage in their beliefs, but they're not allowed to stand out on the street and accost passers by with demands to fill out one of their questionnaires (if they've applied for and been granted the appropriate permit then they can be out on the street conducting interviews with people, they just can't be pushing into people's personal space or acting in a manner that a reasonable person would view as harassment). Same as a certain Evangelical Christian group is allowed to follow and practice what they believe, they are allowed to hold gatherings in public spaces where worship music might be sung/played and prayers said out loud, but what they can't do is play their worship music through a stack of loud speakers so that no one can hear themselves think, shout their prayers through a megaphone so as to disrupt or annoy others, and they sure as hell can't go grab a microphone and start screaming stuff like 'F**gots will burn in hell, the bible commands all f*gs shall be put to death'. To give a more personal example of how freedom of religion is balanced with the laws of the lands and the rights/respects of others in Australia (South Australia at least) - Weather permitting my practice of Wicca includes ritual nudity. Now I'm absolutely free to practice a Wiccan rite sans clothing in the privacy of my own home, or at a specifically designated 'clothing optional' spot where public nudity is legal; however, what I can't do is just march into the middle of my local shopping centre, strip naked, and not expect to get arrested for public indecency. At that point it doesn't matter what my beliefs are, or what rights I have to practice them, I am breaking the law and interfering with other people's right not to feel uncomfortable or harassed - ergo sum I should expect restrictions to be enforced.
 
The scientologists are way out there, of course, but there are plenty of criticisms of our field that are more justified. I guess I wonder if we are doing a worse job or getting more criticism than the other fields of medicine? Someone should do a study on it.

End the study with, "This study requires more study."
 
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