Sorry about your loss, a real tradgedy it appears. I would strongly suspect that some "mild" tranquilizor was used. I would not put it past some of these groups to spike a drink with something to "help" the potential convert along. A tox screening might show something, but then again it might not.
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nutrino
That's sort of my experience too. When i went through the EST training and the follow up couses, the six day and others, they were outrageously cavalier about serious problems that participants had. Their model is anything that doesn't fit their worldview is either a racket, a drop out, a withold, all not getting "it" was interpreted as a naegative act of will, people chose not to get it, not to experience enlightenment, to suffer. The weirdest part of their theory is that all suffering is chosen on some level because the sufferer has not taken responsibility for their suffering. There is absolutely no allowance for the idea that some persons are not in full conscious control of their thought processes.
This belief, if internalized, is horribly onerous because it defines every mental operation as a moral choice, if one has a mental breakdown then one must have been "out integrity" and the breakdown was "payback".
The concept of neurotransmitters and agonist-antagonist relationships among neural nets that are chemically mediated is something they just don't compute. Not sufficient serotonin ? You "created" insufficient serotonin, you see, oh yes you did, on some level, you, personally chose not to have adequate serotonin, and if that made your though processes go all wacked out, you have noone to blame but yourself.
In my original EST training, the trainer explicitly stated that our integrity issues would absolutely, positively cause us to die of cancer. Interesting hypnotic fear installation there... not doing things their way, by their rules would put us at risk of dying of cancer.
Then that had this ludicrous, and I do mean ludicrous, piece of the most ass backwards epistemilogic idiocy called The Model Of The Mind where the trainer started drawing wildly all over a blackboard until it was covered with chalk... this was an accurate representation of how the mind worked, got it ? Are there any questions ? No ?
"Everything is connected to everything so there is NOTHING you can do about the thoughts in your head"... can you imagine the consequences of a roomful of people believing this drivel ? How it might effect their life choices, their attitudes toward therapy, towards questioning the validity of this so called "model"
It was just so pathetic, so intellectually bankrupt, and the room sat there and ate it up like it was the wisdom of the ages. Sad, sad, sad.
I agree, unfortunately most common pop-psychological explanations of the mind adhere to the [i:8adccbf774] tabula rasa[/i:8adccbf774] hypothesis. That is the mind is made up of a blank slate that is written on over the course of a lifetime. Problem is that few people understand that the human brain is in fact a complex biological machine; which consequently has limitations and imperfections built into it. Simply put: you can't fix a broken machine with another broken machine.
Sorry for the digression, but the story smacks of a drug induced psychosis. People usually don't go from a functional state in life to suicidal by simply attending a few days of a LGAT session.