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“pursued or declared a failure.” All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, “You’re a failure!”
    I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read the DSM-IV when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
    I knew from seeing stricken loved ones that many of the disorders listed—depression and schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder and so on—are genuine and overwhelming and devastating. But as L. J. Davis, reviewing the DSM in Harper’s , once wrote: “It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it’s equally possible that he’s simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.”
    I had no idea what to make of it. I decided that if I was to go on a journey to try to spot mental disorders in high places, I needed a second opinion about the authenticity of the labels.
    And so I asked around. Was there any organization out there dedicated to documenting the occasions psychiatrists had become overzealous in their labeling and definitely got it wrong? And that’s how I ended up having lunch three days later with Brian Daniels.
     
     
    Brian is a Scientologist. He works for the British office of an international network of Scientologists called the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights), a crack team determined to prove to the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped. There are Scientologists like Brian in CCHR offices all over the world spending every day of their lives ferreting out stories aimed at undermining the psychiatry profession and getting individual psychiatrists shamed or struck off. Brian was incredibly biased, of course—Tom Cruise once said in a taped speech to Scientologists, “ We are the authorities on the mind!”—but I wanted to hear about the times psychiatry had really got it wrong and nobody knew these stories better than he did.
    I had found the idea of meeting with a leading Scientologist quite intimidating. I’d heard about their reputation for tirelessly pursuing people they considered the Church’s opponents. Would I accidentally say the wrong thing over lunch and find myself tirelessly pursued? But, as it turned out, Brian and I got on well. We shared a mistrust of psychiatry. Admittedly Brian’s was deep and abiding and I’d only had mine for a few days—largely the result of my disappointing self-diagnosis from the DSM-IV —but it gave us something to talk about over lunch.
    Brian recounted to me his recent successes, his highest-profile one having occurred just a few weeks earlier when his office had managed to topple the hugely successful daytime UK TV psychiatrist Dr. Raj Persaud.
    Dr. Raj had for a long time been a much-loved household name even though he had sometimes been criticized for stating the obvious in his newspaper columns. As the writer Francis Wheen recounted in The Guardian in 1996:
    After Hugh Grant was arrested [for soliciting the prostitute Divine Brown in Los Angeles in 1995] Raj Persaud was asked by the Daily Mail to analyze Liz Hurley’s comments about the affair. He argued: “The fact that she is ‘still bewildered’ indicates that her shattered understanding of Hugh has yet to be rebuilt . . . Her statement that she is not in a ‘fit state to make any decisions about the future’ is ominous. It suggests that . . . the future is still an open book.”
    A year ago, when the new-born baby Abbie Humphries was snatched from a hospital, the Daily Mail wondered what sort of woman could do such a thing. Luckily, Dr Persaud was on hand to explain that the kidnapper may have had some sort of “need for a baby.”
     
    And so on. In late 2007, Dr. Persaud was at Brian’s instigation investigated by the General Medical Council for plagiarism. He had written an article attacking Scientology’s war on psychiatry, three