Re: bipolar or mood swings caused by the cult
Date: May 23, 2008 04:33PM
Hello skeptical_one,
Two psychiatrists I have spoken to about lgats have said that the cults trigger or exacerbate bipolar / manic depression, and that people who do have a mood disorder should absolutely stay away from them.
My personal view, based on many months of reading, talking to other people who've been involved in lgats, and my own experience, is that courses are specifically designed to manipulate brain chemistry, and thereby actually create conditions that mimic manic depression in people who do not have the disorder, and exacerbate it in people who do.
The cycle roughly works as follows:
- a training session creates a manic or high phase through a combination of emotional manipulation and physical manipulation of the environment. The purpose of this is to get people feeling good so that they will commit to doing more courses, or commit to recruiting others. People coming out of courses report that they feel like they're "in love". That is the same feeling people report during a manic phase of manic depression. While the brain is in that condition people are more likely to take risks, ignore warnings and problems, shut down critical thinking, be more open to expressing themselves and bonding with other people, etc.
The important thing is that the high is a physical, biological, chemical effect, as well as mental and emotional. The brain and body chemistry are not designed to maintain that high - in fact the body is designed to go into a depressed phase after the high, to give the body a chance to rest and recover. Then when the person starts feeling down, they will usually go back to the lgat, looking for a lift - which they get - and so the cycle goes.
Intuitively it is difficult to understand how hanging around a lecture hall can have such a powerful physical and chemical effect, but it does happen. On some of the courses 95% of people have "out of body" experiences. That is what they are referring to when they say they had "an awesome experience". An "out of body" experience is really just the peak point of mania in the brain, also known as dissociation. They are not faking it, they really do have those experiences just from being in a controlled environment and taking part in controlled activities, designed to create that effect in the physical brain. There are also some processes that put people into shock, which is a physical reaction to trauma, and has a physical (chemical and biological) affect on the whole body, particularly the mind and moods.
So my opinion is that cults like landmark cause mood swings, and mood disorder, AND they exacerbate existing conditions. Of the 50 people in my first lgat course and the 16 in my second course, every single one of us had severe mood swings afterwards; the odds of all 66 of us having a pre-existing problem are ridiculously small. As an indication of the extent and severity of the mood swings, when I went on the advanced lgat course we were told afterwards that "it takes two years for the Inquest experience to settle" - my observation was that it took two years to return to a normal level of mood and functioning, for those of us who never went back.
I haven't been able to find any reliable studies to prove any of this. I don't think the studies have been done and I think they should be, not only for exposing what an exploitative and dangerous con-game these lgats are, but also because it could give really valuable insight into how the brain works, that could be used to help people (rather than make a profit out of them). The big danger in my view is that the lgats trigger mood cycles, and it may be difficult to break them even after leaving the cult - my theory on that is that the brain creates "memory pathways" - once something has cut a path of behaviour (or chemical pathways) into the brain, the path remains there for easy use in the future.
I wish a group of psychiatrists and other scientists would do some tests where they measure all the mood chemicals in people's bodies before they do courses, and then again at various points afterwards. I am pretty sure the pattern of chemical changes would change dramatically in each individual, pre and post cult involvement, as well as show a pattern correlating with attendance of cult functions.
Another factor may be that the courses teach people to cut off certain feelings, and take on a false self - but in the background the normal emotional self is still there, and becomes unbalanced, so that emotions become detached from causes - when people talk about 'mood' it usually means the emotion is not appropriate to the situation (nature or severity of emotion) - so if emotions are suppressed and falsely managed in one environment, they may spill out in another.
Hope something I've said here is helpful to you. If you have or get any other information on the link between cults and mood / brain issues it would be really helpful and interesting if you could post it here.