Inside Scientology’s Secret Propaganda Museum Blaming 9/11 and the Holocaust on Psychiatry

In Hollywood lies ‘Psychiatry: An Industry of Death,’ a bizarre—free—museum where teachers take kids to learn about the evils of mental health care. Yes, it’s a Scientology front.

Tarpley Hitt
04.01.19 5:10 AM ET

LOS ANGELES, California—At 6616 Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks down from major L.A. landmarks like Amoeba Records and the Hollywood Palladium, there’s a white, sterile-looking building with modern angles and blue trim. At night, the place lights up like an ‘80s haunted house: backlighting posters of terrified faces, the crest of a shackled fist holding the scales of justice, and a red sign with Battlestar Galactica font, reading: “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.”

This strange little multi-million-dollar museum, which is free and open to the public seven days a week, is the brick-and-mortar front of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a “mental health watchdog” organization founded in 1969. The Commission was started by a Hungarian doctor named Thomas Szasz, author of a 1960 book called The Myth of Mental Illness. A virulent critic of psychiatry, Szasz spent his career arguing that mental illness was nothing more than a means of ostracizing outliers, and that treating it amounted to a kind of abuse. In his name, CCHR has spent 50 years lobbying against psychiatry by way of “investigating and exposing human rights violations in the field of mental health,” according to its website.

Since 1969, the organization claims to have been involved in passing more than 180 legal reforms in the psychiatry industry; it has allegedly given free tours to more than 250,000 people (70-80 percent of whom are students, one staff member estimated); and it boasts ties to the NAACP—one of their spokesmen, Rev. Fred Shaw, serves as vice president of the NAACP’s Inglewood/South Bay branch (Rev. Shaw declined to be interviewed). It is also—although the museum fails to note it anywhere prominently on the premises—entirely funded by the Church of Scientology.

-snip-