The insanity rate per capita in South Africa is appalling. Through the papers and reports of Peggy Conway and other sources, it is easily seen that a primary requisite in any programme of the rehabilitation of the Bantu in South Africa would be mental health.
Any race which lives in poverty is already overwhelmed by bad food and disease without adding insanity amongst its familial units.
For instance, a white family in the United States which has amongst its number one insane person is crippled economically through concern and confusion. In a family already burdened by the environment, one insane or even neurotic person could become the back-breaking straw.
However, my records show (and will have to do until I can make a closer survey myself) that the number of insane and neurotic persons runs much higher than amongst comparable populations. The subject has not been studied well probably because “native customs” or “tribal characteristics” are too often advanced as an explanation of irrational conduct. True, there are native customs and tribal characteristics but it would take a Scientologist to separate out the ethnic factors and understand the remainder as neurosis and psychosis.
Malnutrition and anxiety in any person, as we well know, can produce all the symptoms of insanity.
Having studied twelve separate primitive peoples in far flung parts of Earth in this life, it has become obvious that when a state of primitiveness is veneered by white customs the incidence of insanity rises amongst the primitives. For example, the American Indian, when he lost his tribal lands and hunting diet, turned to alcoholism and other degraded forms of insanity. The whites then adjudicated these as characteristics of the Indian rather than insanity.
Any race which is seeking survival under adjusted conditions experiences a high incidence of mental illness.
The keynote of insanity is destructive efforts on various dynamics.
It is doubtful if anyone has realized the part insanity has played in various disturbances, nor how it has prevented the bettering of various conditions in the world.
Mental Health, a real programme of mental health, is vital to the public peace and public safety.
Here we have a hardworking man, trying to adjust, trying to hold his head up. At home he has a wife too neurotic to help, a teenage son that has gone the route of criminal insanity, a father who has taken to drink, all of them hanging upon his work and pay. It’s rough trying to remain steady, hardworking and sane under such conditions. The temptation to quit is strong. Before a populace can be a credit it must have some hope it can live through it — and insanity is the biggest threat to that hope.
Yet insanity in any population is not limited to the poor. Indeed, the incidence of insanity in the United States is as high in the very rich as it is amongst the very poor.
Real mental health, which the Scientologist can accomplish as the practitioner of the only validated psychotherapy in the world today, would reduce the statistics.
South Africa lately suffered from insane have-nots and even worse at the hands of an insane “have”.
Insanity is a problem that is both legal and scientific. A criminal is in fact insane. A terrorist is insane. People can be policed only so far. The insane, as we know so well on a scientific level, are so far from being policed that they cannot follow the simplest order.
Insanity is neither hard to understand or treat. But only Scientology could say this.
Insanity divides into eight general types. These are easily plotted, they are irrationally destructive or succumb impulses on each dynamic. Assign the tone scale to each type and you have all the insanities there are.
The cure of insanity is accomplished in its deeper stages by very light and careful handling. A person has to be brought up to the level of being processed. The first step is rest. The second step is mild exercise. The third step is group processing. Above this level processing is possible. The cost of treatment is not high if undertaken sensibly. But 1 9th Century practitioners who knew little about it got on a compulsive “do” and, failing with milder methods, resorted to brutality. Fortunately, such practices are now fading out under our influence. Rest camps and hospitals would do more for insanity than all the violence in the world. But only a Scientologist would be wise enough to refuse to Q and A with the violence of insanity by using violence to “cure” it.
Scientology could handle the problem of insanity in South Africa. Only when insanity has been handled could there be broad guarantees of a calm future. What is a riot but a third dynamic insanity?
The tremendous work done by Peggy Conway, bless her, in her surveys and contacts now comes to great use.
Without in any way transgressing, we have already formed a programme on this.
We must legally establish ourselves, support the government in its desire to handle this problem, and coordinate our efforts.
The government and the population need our help. And if we help we will bring order in our sphere of activity. We will be wearing our own hats.
I am in deadly earnest about our role in public peace. It is not political but technical and as such we have no peers.
All we need to work on at the moment is getting people convinced of the truth that we can help the situation and that only we can help in this sphere.
So here we go. Are you with me?