I wish you guys would subject ex-premies comments to the same scrutiny.

Like your comment - Being a member of a cult confers on otherwise mentally healthy people some of the symptomology of mental illness, not just limited to a higher suicide rate.

Would anyone like to try and justify the above?

Well I should have thought it close to common sense, but Robert Robbins and Jerrold Post have made something of a study of the cult phenomenon. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that in the absence of a strong social order people would degenerate into a "state of nature" characterized by the "war of all against all." But in fact it is the formation of small enclaves of people bonding together "in a false comraderie of dishonest accord" that is the true Hobbesian nightmare:

In the dependency group, members behave as if the leader were all-wise and all-powerful. They are unable to function without the leader. They behave as if their primary goal were to gain security and protection from the leader, whom they treat as omnipotent and omnsiscient--an idealized God-like figure. Although this fantasy is unrealizable, by the manner in which they relate to the leader, the members act as if they could create a situation that would conform to their wishes. In the dependency group, the members behave as if they have no judgment or knowledge of their own, giving unlimited authority to the leader no matter how experienced or knowledgeable they may in fact be. (Post, Political Paranoia, p. 84)

This is but one kind of group pathology, but the essence of all of them is that the members of the group shield one another from the psychological consequences of their acts and thoughts. And, of course, in order to maintain this sort of internal order they have to become insular... which will ultimately lead to at least one of two conditions: depression or paranoia.

One of the primary cohesive elements binding individuals into institutionalized human association is that of defense against psychotic (paranoid and depressive) anxiety. Accordingly, groups will regularly display hostility, suspiciousness, and other forms of maladaptive behavior that individuals display, but will often exceed individuals in the degree of these distortions of reality. The social organization is the reservoir or holding mechanism for such primative distortions, which if expressed individually would seem psychotic. (Post, p. 85)