Welcome to indoctrination, a weekly conversation series about protecting yourself from systems of control.

I'm your host, Rachel Bernstein.

April Snow Cass was born into Scientology in 1982 and was in the Sea organization, the name for Scientology's clergy,

briefly as a teenager, at which time her parents gave up custody to the church.

During that time of her life, she started seeing red flags within the organization, but

it wasn't until her mid-20s that she finally stepped away for good, and only recently in 2017 was she officially declared Scientology's version of excommunication, in which friends and family tend to shun and completely cut contact with the individual.

Although she's never been shown this actual documentation of her being excommunicated, one of her crimes, in quotes, no doubt, is providing a space for others questioning Scientology to speak about their concerns and traumas allowed and find help by speaking to others. What began as one-on-one

coffee dates and phone conversations led to an eventual organizing of support groups and group

therapy sessions, a practice which Scientologists are forbidden to do. April feels strongly that

discouraging psychotherapy and demonizing psychiatric medications is

harmful, and it's also abusive behavior that results sometimes in suicide within the community.

And that ignoring disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, it's causing parishioners who are suffering to go

undiagnosed and untreated. Up until this point, she's kept the conversation relatively private,

but having lost a great number of friends and acquaintances to suicide and having a family

member suffering in silence, she has begun to feel an obligation to speak out.

I was honored to be able to speak with her, and I am very excited that you're going to be able to hear part one today of a two-part episode with April.

Here she is.

Welcome, everyone, to the podcast and especially I want to welcome my guest today, April

cast. She is a wonderful, wonderful person, and I hope you get to know her better today. And I have her here

on video as well as audio. So it's really nice to see you. Good to see your face too. Yeah.

It's been a while. It's been a while. But I'm so glad that you were wanting to talk with me today and talk with whoever is listening

to this show. But can you tell us a little bit about you when you're, you know, what do you do

...