FOR an organisation that’s vehemently anti-psychiatry, the Scientologists seem to be fishing for a lot of mental illnesses.
I’m taking their personality test, having walked past their Sydney HQ yesterday and having my interest piqued by the tatty façade.
Hitting their website back at Stacey’s house, I locate the 200-question personality test, which you can either carry out online or in a Scientology centre; the idea being they’ll then assess you, find you ailing and prescribe a course of rigorous doctrine. It’s called the Oxford Capacity Analysis test, which may or may not be to make you think of Oxford University.
I decide to crosscheck with Stacey and see if her answers for me would be the same as mine.
“Am I forceful?”
“No, I don’t think you’re forceful, I think you’re sly and petulant. I think you’re a stubborn mole. I mean, mule. You think you can just get in someone’s car and drive it. I think you throw precaution to the wind.”
“Would I use corporal punishment on a child aged 10 if it refused to obey me?”
“Corporal punishment? What, you’d murder it?”
“That’s capital punishment.”
Back to the anti-psychiatry, though, and I find I’m spotting all sorts of questions that seem to be rooting out cases of manic depression; variants of “Do you find yourself being extra active for periods of several days?”
Then there’s paranoid schizophrenia (“Do you ever feel people are working against you?”), autism (“Do you ever browse through timetables just for pleasure?” “Is your voice monotonous, rather than varied in pitch?”), OCD (“Do you feel very uneasy in disordered surroundings?”), tourettes (Do you get occasional twitches of your muscles, when there is no logical reason for it?) and some pigeon-toed dancing around depression.
When I’m done, I get the message: “Thank you for completing your test – your answers have been forwarded to a consultant who will contact you shortly to go over the results with you and show you the graph.”
Keeper? Never got the follow-up call. It’s like the eHarmony Compatibility Test all over again.
Hey man, now you're really living 
Hey did you notice that several of the questions got used as lyrics in Faith No More’s “Land of Sunshine”? Unless they’ve been changed since I did the test 14 years ago.