Death of a Scientologist Part 11
JimDBB
Greg asked if he could sleep at Bob's that night, but Bob wanted his son
safe in the care of psychiatrists. He urged Greg to check himself into a
hospital, and he says Laura did too, after returning home from her job as a
naturalist at a private school. "That surprised me, but I was glad to hear
it," says Bob, who believes that by this point Laura had left the church.
Greg reluctantly checked himself into the psychiatric ward of Good Shepherd
Hospital in Barrington, not out of the belief the staff could help him, but
because he had nowhere else to spend the night.
It was late when Bob got home. After so many hours in crisis mode he
couldn't sleep. He wrote a note informing Greg's doctor about his
involvement in Scientology, then outlined what he would say to his son the
next day. The following morning in the psych unit, the first thing he told
Greg was that Scientology was evil and that it was his enemy. Bob says he'd
never denounced something dear to his son or expressed disapproval of his
choices, and Greg appeared shocked and wounded. "It was as if I'd slapped
him in the face."
Every two or three days Bob wrote family members, updating them on the
situation and asking them to help Greg find the strength and courage to
continue living. He says that Greg and Laura considered the letters and
invasion of their privacy. But reaching out to the rest of the family came
naturally to Bob, and he figured Greg would need all the support - as well
as assurances that others would do what they could to help his son. He
wanted Greg to know that his life mattered. "I wanted to keep you alive," he
wrote after Greg had reproached him for spreading the news and Laura had
declared him "persona non grata."
Bob says Greg forgave him, but Laura didn't. From that point on, Bob says,
he was "out of the loop" and didn't see much of Greg. They kept in touch
primarily by letters. Bob preferred them to phone calls or E-mail, because
he thought Greg would be more likely to think through what he was saying
instead of firing off placating remarks. "In one sense I thought, I don't
want any more bullshit about 'Hey, everything is OK,'" says Bob. "Laura
called it 'Greg's PR.'"
Greg tried to commit suicide twice by overdosing in the next couple of
months. In January his 17-year-old son found him on the floor, barely alive.
In February he E-mailed a suicide note to Jim Hanon. Hanon got it within 20
minutes and alerted Barrington police, who arrived in time to save Greg's
life.
Bob's attempts to get information about Greg's condition were futile.
Desperate, he visited the now defunct Lisa McPherson Trust. Not far from
Scientology's headquarters in Clearwater and staffed by high-level
defectors, the trust had been founded to expose the church's "abusive and
deceptive" practices and to provide support to ex-Scientologists attempting
to readjust to life outside the church. It put Bob in touch with former
Scientologists who'd reached the same level as Greg, OT7. One of them, Greg
Barnes, remembers receiving a desperate call from Bob: "He was a father who
was lost. A distressed man going, 'What do I do?' - reaching out to everyone
and anyone who could help his son."
Barnes spoke on the phone with Greg about seven times. They had much in
common. They were the same age, and each was married with one son. Each had
spent more than 20 years in Scientology and had become an IAS patron. Barnes
says he and his wife had left the church of their own volition a year
earlier, after deciding that it had altered Hubbard's teachings.
Greg told Barnes he'd been under extreme pressure during his last visit to
Clearwater, and that church officials had said he couldn't leave until he
completed certain regimens. "He had to get back to work. He was stressed,
and he communicated that he
[Chicago READER | August 16, 2002 | SECTION ONE (page) 25
[Pullquote: DEFECTORS SAY THAT WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG IN SCIENTOLOGY
THERE'S ONLY ONE PERSON TO BLAME, AND IT'S NOT L. RON HUBBARD.]
was stressed," Barnes says. "They took that to mean he was unstable." He
says Greg was then sent to an auditor, who made things worse. "If you
misapply this technology you can drive someone insane. You can cause someone
to become psychotic."
Greg also told Hanon about the auditing he'd done on his last trip to
Clearwater. "He confided in me that in one of these sessions he opened
himself up spiritually," Hanon says, "and he felt something in his mind
break." Defectors say that when something goes wrong in Scientology there's
only one person to blame, and it's not L. Ron Hubbard. "His technology -
they call it his tech now - his tech always works," says Jim Beebe. "If you
don't get the results that he claims you will get, there is something wrong
with you."
As a good Scientologist, Greg blamed himself. He told Hanon he'd known that
there was a psychological risk in doing "mental training" and that the
church had given him a waiver to sign stating as much. "I feel I have been
irreparably damaged by my participation in the advanced courses," he wrote
his father after his February suicide attempt, "but such damage happened by
my own hand, by my own decisions and approaches to things. Thousands of
people do these courses and do very well; this tremendous suffering is
something that I engendered through my own substandard auditing, and an
approach to things that was not ethically sound." In short, he wrote, "I
screwed *myself* up, using their technology."
Greg said he shouldn't have been on the advanced levels. "This was actually
told to me in early 1981," he wrote, "but I continued pursuing these levels
through the '80s and '90s, against church policy. (Anyone who has had
psychiatric counseling and/or psychiatric drugs, as I had had at college, is
not supposed to be able to receive *any* auditing, let alone the advanced
levels at Flag.)"
Barnes put Greg in touch with other high-level defectors. One had spent
seven years trying to get through 0T7. She says Greg wasn't coping well. "He
was having dark thoguhts about himself and felt he was covered with BTs,"
she says. "He felt he couldn't get rid of them."
Greg did feel a glimmer of hope after speaking to a former member of the
church's Sea Organization, which is made up of full-time employees who hold
its "most essential and trusted positions." Greg got the impression that the
man could use Scientology practices on him to correct the damage that had
been done. After speaking to him, Greg promised his father he wouldn't kill
himself.
The former Sea Organization member, who has asked to remain anonymous,
wasn't as optimistic. Greg, he says, was "really stuck." He sensed that Greg
wanted "more than anything" to get back into the church. He knew that would
never happen - Greg had told him he'd failed a "security check" in
Clearwater and had been declared a Potential Trouble Source. "Because of
what happened with Lisa McPherson," he says, "they're very paranoid about
the chance of anyone flipping out."
Barnes worried that Greg was beyond help. "The only place he could ever
reach his spiritual freedom was gone," he says. "His dreams were gone. Life
was taken away from him." He'd been led to believe Scientology was the only
solution for his problems. "He was taught to believe psychiatry was evil -
now he was in the hands of the most vicious, perverted people."
The church's Mary Anne Ahmad, who knew Greg "fairly well," says "What really
troubles me and is really ironic is the fact that the two things that he
detested the most were the two things that dogged him until the day he died
- psychiatry and deprogrammers." She denies that the church excommunicated
Greg. "He seemed to be having some rather large trobules," she says, "and he
left the church to go sort out his life. And basically the only thing I
know, his troubles seemed to be family based. His father and maybe his
mother-in-law had objections to some of his choices in life, and so he had a
lot of pressure on him. To add to that, even though he was offered help, he
declined and decided to go with whatever his family was pressuring him into,
which was psychiatry. Frankly, no Scientologist would ever seek psychiatry
as a solution to their problems."
Ahmad wouldn't say specifically what kind of help Scientology offered Greg.
In a letter he wrote to his father on February 28, 2001, he mentioned that
the church has proposed a "'review' session" while he was in Clearwater but
that he'd declined, on account of the time it would take.
When asked why she thinks so many former members have launched impassioned
campaigns against the church, Ahmad says, "There's only one reason and one
reason only - they have lots of words they don't understand," which hampers
their grasp of "what the religion is about."