In November of 2000, my life broke into a hundred pieces when my church threw me out. They said I had a 'condition' they couldn't help me with, then sent me away, telling me never to return.

I tried to commit suicide twice by overdosing in the next couple of months. In January of 2001 my 17-year-old son found me on the floor, barely alive. In February I E-mailed a suicide note to my friend, Jim Hanon. Hanon got it within 20 minutes and alerted the local police, who arrived in time to save my life.

As a good Scientologist, I blame myself. I told Jim Hanon I knew there was a psychological risk in doing "mental training" and that the church had given me a waiver to sign stating as much. "I feel I have been irreparably damaged by my participation in the advanced courses," I wrote my father after one suicide attempt, "but such damage happened by my own hand, by my own decisions and approaches to things. Thousands of people do these courses and do very well; this tremendous suffering is something that I engendered through my own substandard auditing, and an approach to things that was not ethically sound." In short, I told him, "I screwed *myself* up, using their technology."

I shouldn't have been on the advanced levels. "This was actually told to me in early 1981," I wrote, "but I continued pursuing these levels through the '80s and '90s, against church policy. (Anyone who has had psychiatric counseling and/or psychiatric drugs, as I had at college, is not supposed to be able to receive *any* auditing, let alone the advanced levels at Flag.)"

Well, that's fixed now. In June 2001, I pulled onto the shoulder of a road in Montcalm County, northeast of Grand Rapids. Using duct tape, I he attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of my  Honda, then ran it through the passenger window, sealing off the opening with a towel. I sat back in the passenger's seat, folded my arms across my chest, and breathed in a lethal dose of carbon monoxide- just as L. Ron Hubbard's son had done 25 years earlier.

Police found the suicide note to my son on the nightstand in my hotel room. It consisted of a single sentence: "Goodbye [son], you were a good buddy. Love dad."