Tom Cruise is still wrong about psychiatry

I did not have Tom Cruise being regarded as a sage oracle on my 2025 bingo card.

Tom Cruise’s infamous 2005 anti-psychiatry rant on the TODAY show has been making the rounds again on social media. Why? Because misinformation is more fashionable than ever before — and a lot of people are saying that he was right.

Take a click on this for a very short refresher.

Obviously, the arrogance he expresses is astounding (“You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do”). Claiming to know better than everyone else, even the experts, is a classic hallmark of the crackpot. Some of Cruise’s basic points:

• Psychiatry is a pseudoscience.

• Chemical imbalances in the brain do not exist.

• Psych meds “mask the problem” and don’t address the cause.

• Psych meds are fundamentally harmful.

• He advocates vitamins instead.

As you likely know, Cruise’s antagonism toward psychiatry does not come from study or expertise — it comes from Scientology. Scientology is noteworthy for its aggressive rejection of many sciences, most notably psychiatry and psychology, but also neuroscience, the scientific method in general, even physics and other natural sciences.

There are two basic reasons why L. Ron Hubbard baked these into the ideology:

1. Most of Scientology’s income comes from selling “auditing,” their own purely pseudoscientific substitute for psychology based on the notion that your brain is inhabited by an immortal “thetan” who is reincarnated many times.

2. The entire science fiction backstory to Scientology depends on a wholesale heave-ho to the laws of physics, as does much science fiction.

Here’s a longer clip of the interview on YouTube, and the reason to look at it is not to suffer through the video, but just to run your eyes down the comments. Virtually every commenter is in full agreement with Cruise — and these are current comments. But the interesting thing, and the reason why this whole thing is coming to the foreground again, is that the general public’s increasing embrace of anti-science, rejection of expertise, and faith in conspiracy theories makes Cruise’s claims believable — even desirable. I say it’s interesting because when he made them in 2005, he did so merely as an infomercial for Scientology (whose Kool-Aid he had overindulged in). At the time, it made him look like a crackpot. But in 2025, it makes him a visionary.

We truly do live in an Endarkenment.