Preamble

Chizuo Matsumoto alias Shoko Asahara - Founder of Aum shinsen no Kai in 1984 and, after claiming enlightenment, under the new name of Aum Shinri Kyo in 1987. He was born in Yatsushiro-city, Kumamoto prefecture, March 2, 1955... originally a Pharmacist and owner of a drugstore in Funabashi,Chiba prefecture, Japan.

Aum Supreme Truth was a phenomena in the 1990s. It had been raided in 1990 and then in 1995. It was in the news. It expanded. It was controversial. It had opponents. But it was different. What was the difference? Why did it travel down a path that few other groups ever went down? What other similar organizations had gone down that same path? What was behind it? These are the questions I asked myself when I first saw the media headlines in late March 1995. I reasoned that if Aum members had been involved in killings, then there would be people inside the organization who had been dealing in mind altering drugs as well as other mental treatments. When I saw pictures of people being removed from the Aum hospital in drugged comas I felt I knew immediately what had happening inside Aum. I also believed that this information would be suppressed and the story would be a long time in the telling.

While the source of the reasons for the killings in Aum was becoming very clear to myself as likely to have been created by psychiatric treatment, scores of psychiatrists turned up within the media all preaching their message that they were the only ones capable to judge what was happening inside Aum. The result was much psychiatric double talk on how Aum, being a religious incorporation, was performing a form of mind-control, a theory already long since debunked in the USA. As a result the data on the psychiatric experiments which Aum were performing on their members was slowly let out into the media along with much other irrelevant data in such a way so that the source of the problems of Aum could remain hidden.

Thus in evaluating the phenomena of Aum the media was unable to be see the actual source of the crimes at Aum, which of course was the psychiatric treatment, and which continues in hospitals around Japan today.

This book is about Aum, and its psychiatrists, and its doctors, who were the source of reasons why the indiscriminate killings occur. This book is also about the psychiatrists who the Aum doctors learned form, as well as the backgrounds of the psychiatric techniques Aum used. This book is also about psychiatry, its history, and what it really is.

I would like to thank the Citizens Commission on Human Rights which provided much material documenting the background of psychiatry around the world. Nick Broadhurst