The Cult Awareness Network (CAN), once a clearinghouse for information about destructive cults but now closely allied with the Church of Scientology, has distributed a press release linking psychiatric treatment to the suicides of the Heaven's Gate cult members.

Scientologists acquired the right to the CAN name after the original CAN was driven into bankruptcy by a lawsuit handled by Scientology attorney Kendrick Moxon, J.D. (Psychiatric News, January 17).

The Church of Scientology and its various affiliates, including the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, have a long history of strident opposition to organized psychiatry.

Psychiatrists "have to be aware that [CAN] went into bankruptcy fighting the cults, and the legal process permitted those they were attacking to gain control of the organization," said APA Vice President Rodrigo Munoz, M.D., who becomes APA's president-elect next month. "As a result, the members of APA have to be prepared to review any information coming from the new Cult Awareness Network as representing the views of the new owners, which, according to Ms. Kisser and the Wall Street Journal, are closely affiliated with the Church of Scientology."

Munoz, a private practitioner in San Diego, was referring to a guest editorial by Cynthia Kisser in the April 1 Wall Street Journal. Kisser is an expert on destructive cults and was executive director of the Cult Awareness Network prior to its takeover by Scientology allies. She discussed the press release from the new CAN with Psychiatric News.

"This press statement reads very much like it could have come from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which is a Scientology-founded organization and has long been a nemesis of psychiatry," said Kisser. "To try and explain away the tragedy at Rancho Santa Fe [Heaven's Gate] as the result of psychiatry or the misuse of psychiatric drugs is shallow, insensitive, and totally misses the mark as to why this event happened. Based on my familiarity with how the new CAN is being run, I have every reason to believe that it will not seriously address the cult issue but will be a mouthpiece for groups that have a long history of bashing psychology and psychiatry."

At a meeting of the San Diego Medical Society shortly after the cult suicide was reported, Munoz spoke with the society's president, obstetrician David Priver, M.D., about the event and issues common to psychiatry and the rest of medicine. The medical society is planning a joint statement with the San Diego Psychiatric Society to address such issues, Priver told Psychiatric News.

"As a spokesman for organized medicine, [I can say that] we stand in solidarity with psychiatry, and feel that an attack on psychiatry is an attack on the house of medicine as a whole," he commented.

(Psychiatric News, April 18, 1997)