What is Scientology's Issue With Psychiatry?

 This is a complicated issue but an important question.

Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard had enormous personal psychological problems and actually sought help but was rejected. He also plagiarized a type of Freudian therapy called abreactive therapy and in a form combined with hypnosis (similar to hypnotherapy in that that is a combination of hypnosis and psychotherapy while Dianetics combines hypnosis and abreactive therapy covertly, Hubbard read about this in a book he recommended, Hypnotism Comes of Age, and so knew that hypnosis and another therapy can be combined) used plagiarized ideas to present covert hypnosis called Dianetics.

Abreactive therapy had been tried decades earlier and rejected for failing to help patients in the long term, creating dependence on the therapist in the patients and increasing suggestibility in the patients in their relationship with the therapist.

Hubbard knew when he created (really stole and repackaged) Dianetics that he would be opposed by doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists and even hypnotists who understand that he is fundamentally dishonest and taking ideas and practices from their fields without being honest. And also that they would ask that he be regulated under any relevant laws for their practices and also that the failed and abandoned methods he promoted as miraculous would be exposed as analyzed and debunked thoroughly cast offs of an earlier time.

He knew that the fraudulent and harmful nature of Dianetics would be exposed, so he made a preemptive strike and asserted his superiority to his critics and focused on their flaws, both real and imagined.

In his criticism Hubbard combined some true information about crimes, failures, and abuses in psychiatry and false accusations that have no credible evidence.

He had a personality driven by the traits of a human predator we can see in models with labels like malignant narcissism, (combining selfishness, immaturity and a profound lack of empathy, compassion, and basic human decency) aka traumatic narcissism as described by Daniel Shaw and even Solipsistic Reality by Robert Jay Lifton (a state of wanting one's wishes and thoughts to be able to trump reality).

A person in that mindset can ruthlessly project disavowed aspects of self (flaws like weakness, being emotionally vulnerable, being wrong, a lack of knowledge or ability, not being perfect and godlike) onto acceptable targets which automatically includes critics and potential threats to the false self (a facade of being infallible, all-knowing, unlimited in ability, talent, skill and capabilities, being second to none in everything desirable, being handsome, virile, of perfect moral character, godlike and above mortals). That is a pretty routine evaluation of a person who displays the behavior and beliefs that Ronald Hubbard did over his life.

So, to sum up he was rejected by psychiatry in his personal life. He plagiarized and combined ideas that made people suggestible from hypnosis and from a failed form of Freudian therapy that was known to also increase suggestibility in patients as well as dependence on the therapist and this repackaged as something far more powerful could fool some percentage of people into thinking that a permanent, non-hypnotic process is being used to improve their minds. Hubbard knew that he was not doing what he claimed but that he would rapidly be exposed by experts in numerous fields including psychiatry and the harm his methods created would be exposed, so he simply denied the truth about himself and Dianetics and attacked his critics, in some cases even attacking experts before they attacked him, to get in the first blow.