"Deprogramming"—Reality-Inducing Therapy?

Parents sometimes make up their own minds to hire deprogrammers. More often, however, the deprogrammers actively persuade parents that their sons and daughters have been "brainwashed" by the Krsna consciousness movement or are under its "mind control.'" Some parents have hired vigilantes like Ted Patrick (who is now serving a one-year jail sentence, in Orange County, California, for false imprisonment of a Krsna member). Such "deprogramming" amounts to nothing less than extreme psychological and often physical intimidation aimed at inducing a person to renounce his or her life-style. Usually, the "deprogrammers" isolate and restrain the victim. Then they confiscate and destroy religious apparel and possessions (books, holy pictures, and so forth), and they vilify the person's beliefs through hours of shouting. In one case, they physically beat a pregnant mother. In another case, a Hare Krsna member refused to stop reciting prayers, and they filled his mouth with ice and gagged him. Such "deprogramming" often lasts for several weeks-all this to get the "brainwashed" person back to a "normal" state, in which he can again make "free choices." That these torture sessions have been euphemistically called "stress tests," "intensive therapy" and "reality-inducing therapy" should not, perhaps, strike us as unusual. In our age of Orwellian ''Newspeak," Hitler named his death camps "Charitable Foundations for Institutional Care."