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The church my wife attends recently had a daughter of one of the church missions leaders commit suicide while dad left her home and went on an international mission trip. Religion did plenty of harm to her mental health.
There are a lot of reasons people commit suicide, many of them quite irrational, so as little fondness as I have for religion, unless you are withholding critical details about the reasons for her suicide I would not assume that religion was a significant input to it (though admittedly it would not surprise me if it were, especially in particular sects).
In other words if a child commits suicide and that child happens to have religiously devout parents, that does not automatically equate to religion being the primary cause.
Similarly if a father travels for work and so is often not home, this might cause a child to feel unloved or neglected and commit suicide, but I know a lot of people who grew up in that situation who are happy and well adjusted adults. I have heard people argue that not being home enough or not home schooling your children or being insufficiently devout or any number of things contributes to children having personal problems. Children specifically, people generally, and life itself are all way more nuanced and complicated than that.
There are a lot of reasons people commit suicide, many of them quite irrational, so as little fondness as I have for religion, unless you are withholding critical details about the reasons for her suicide I would not assume that religion was a significant input to it (though admittedly it would not surprise me if it were, especially in particular sects).
In other words if a child commits suicide and that child happens to have religiously devout parents, that does not automatically equate to religion being the primary cause.
Similarly if a father travels for work and so is often not home, this might cause a child to feel unloved or neglected and commit suicide, but I know a lot of people who grew up in that situation who are happy and well adjusted adults. I have heard people argue that not being home enough or not home schooling your children or being insufficiently devout or any number of things contributes to children having personal problems. Children specifically, people generally, and life itself are all way more nuanced and complicated than that.
Great post. Suicide is a conscious decision, and rejection of all other options. There is no blame.
There are a lot of reasons people commit suicide, many of them quite irrational, so as little fondness as I have for religion, unless you are withholding critical details about the reasons for her suicide I would not assume that religion was a significant input to it (though admittedly it would not surprise me if it were, especially in particular sects).
In other words if a child commits suicide and that child happens to have religiously devout parents, that does not automatically equate to religion being the primary cause.
Similarly if a father travels for work and so is often not home, this might cause a child to feel unloved or neglected and commit suicide, but I know a lot of people who grew up in that situation who are happy and well adjusted adults. I have heard people argue that not being home enough or not home schooling your children or being insufficiently devout or any number of things contributes to children having personal problems. Children specifically, people generally, and life itself are all way more nuanced and complicated than that.
You are correct there are many reasons, and being aware of the situation, that I don't feel comfortable sharing here in the event the family happened to run across it, I must refrain from providing additional details. That said, the suicide was directly influenced by the family religion, it is reasonable to expect without those particular beliefs, the outcome would have been different. That is not to pretend the additional underlying reason for her demise might not have still contributed to at alternative life journey for her that also lead to her death, no one could know that. But the influence of the religious beliefs most certainly were contributing factors.
Religion provides belonging, refuge, tradition and common cause. It's quite good at it, particularly outside of the more strident / authoritarian / fundamentalist sects.
Mental health care is just hiring a paid friend to listen and give you advice. It's apples and oranges. And in my experience and observation, the current "state of the art" isn't that great; it's uneven at best. And a lot of it has degenerated into a "manage the patient with meds" creepshow where they don't listen or advise anyway.
I'm not saying that providing better access to free or truly affordable mental health care would not be a tremendous thing to have, as would be true for medical care generally. But it can't be swapped out for what churches provide.
The real equivalent is things like humanist societies, perhaps many of the Unitarian congregations, and various nonprofits / causes that you can get involved in, as well as the social opportunities afforded by senior citizen centers, community sports / pools and such, many aspects of the arts (local theater troupes, etc). Plus of course whatever social pursuits you can scare up on your own. Subject of course to whatever pandemic or other dystopian Fresh Hell is in play.
Unfortunately, my wife and I have not found it easy to connect with open, real, self-aware, loyal, empathetic people who actually care enough to be more than "just acquaintances". That is easier said than done. Also, at our age, too many people are dying off. We lost three very good neighbors to cancer in one year, just before the pandemic. All people that we were starting to really connect with. Another one simply moved away for personal reasons, like 20% of all homeowners do every year. That's another factor; we're a mobile society and people don't stay put long enough to get to know them. Even churches struggle with that issue.
Certainly religion covers more bases than mental health. I have clarified that a few times on this thread, but because my OP was not written as clearly as it could have been, I seem to have to continuously clarify that. That is my fault.
Religion offers mental health support among many other things. In this thread I am trying to establish if there will be correlation between this one variable (mental health support) and religious prevalence.
If we can increase mental health support significantly (and that is certainly happening in the UK which is where I am originally from, the US is lagging behind a bit), then will there be a number of people who would have previously turned to religion if they were living in the past, who would not need to turn to religion in the future? My speculative answer is "yes," but I need to device a method for testing that.
Just as one example, there are two options:
-Meditation will help your mental health. It is a just a way of affecting chemicals/neurons in your brain.
-Meditation will help your mental health. it is a connection with the oneness though the phi-pi-rho-chi field with the bam-warm aspect of consciousness non-duality.
If children are taught the first (as is happening increasingly in the UK), will they have need for the unsupported ramblings of the second? My speculation is they won't need the second, but that hypothesis needs to be tested.
Make no mistake though, any positive benefit is positive, so where religion provides that great! I'm merely speculating whether as our understanding gets better, we will have less need for religion (less need - not no need).
The direction of travel of knowledge has been from religion to rational explanations (Thor to scientific explanation of thunder, "let there be light" to the scientific explanation for the formation of Earth, etc), and I see the same happening with mental health.
True, but the post I was responding to was a response to another post talking about the time in England where following the wrong form of Christianity would mean being burnt on a stake.
Even today in the US, significant parts of religion seek to affect the lives of all (though law, etc). Though this is not the thread to discuss political specifics.
If religion want to affect the lives of the population, then it needs to stand up to scrutiny.
Can improved mental health support replace religion?
Improved mental health support can’t/won’t replace religion, but education (relative to psychology) can make a difference for many. It’s simply a matter of acquiring/understanding the tools necessary to manage emotions and problems in life (or know when to seek assistance) sans the need to rely on some sort of higher power to do so - or someone on the internet, for that matter. :-)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter600
Secondly, religion may help people's mental health, but it comes with a lot of baggage, and also requires people to believe in things that there is no strong independent evidence for.
Religion doesn’t come with (emotional) baggage; people do. Hence the point of (a basic) education in psychology. If one knows how to identify/handle problems early on (or seek assistance in doing so), the less baggage they will need to carry through life.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter600
Or to put it another way will society move away from the placebo and towards the actual treatment?
That placebos can (and often do) work speaks to the power of the mind in and of itself. If someone believes in prayer, it can have an affect despite it being a placebo. It is far easier to maintain psychological health (even with placebos) than it is to treat it with medication when it’s gone off the rails.
Religion doesn’t come with (emotional) baggage; people do. Hence the point of (a basic) education in psychology. If one knows how to identify/handle problems early on (or seek assistance in doing so), the less baggage they will need to carry through life.
On the other hand, some forms of religion disparage the validity / reliability of mental health care, particularly psychology, as it's not faith-based. My first wife was profoundly mentally ill and opposed to seeking any sort of treatment. This was fed by our belief-system putting more credence in amateur counselors in a church setting than in trained mental health professionals. The general idea was that Jesus is the answer to everything, including, apparently paranoid schizophrenia and boderline personality disorder. Of course I'm not saying some of those kinds of churches didn't have the sense to know when they were in over their heads; I'm just saying that my particular one most definitely did not.
This led at one point to an excorcism being performed on my wife, which is pretty 17th century standard-of-care. So yeah I have Opinions on this matter, lol.
While it's true that each person's emotional baggage is ultimately on them, it is equally true that much of that baggage comes from disordered thinking and ideas such as I describe above, which is to say that each expression of organized religion has its share of responsibility for what it promotes and proscribes. It isn't all on the individual. It isn't as if there's never any element of organizational abuse behind people's emotional issues.
Suicide is a conscious decision, and rejection of all other options. There is no blame.
A conscious decision; but for many, it’s an irrational one based on a flawed thought process due to (mental) illness. Hence the importance of education/identification of such vs. leaving it to (any kind of) religion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
On the other hand, some forms of religion disparage the validity / reliability of mental health care, particularly psychology, as it's not faith-based. My first wife was profoundly mentally ill and opposed to seeking any sort of treatment.
It ultimately falls on the individual and/or those around them. I’m sorry about your wife, but is it not on you to assure she gets the help she needs - actually, long before she becomes ‘profoundly mentally-ill’, for that matter. Again, it’s a matter of education.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
While it's true that each person's emotional baggage is ultimately on them, it is equally true that much of that baggage comes from disordered thinking and ideas such as I describe above, which is to say that each expression of organized religion has its share of responsibility for what it promotes and proscribes.
However, it is ultimately on the individual as to how they interpret such ideas and others’ disordered thinking as we certainly can’t control what is said in the name of religion any more than we can monitor/hold Republicanism (or any party) accountable for every illogical, harmful or unreasonable thing one might say. That said, the majority of those who follow a religion are not maniacal or unreasonable about it; the same is true for atheists as well i.e. most of us are not proponents of antitheism.
Firstly I am not saying that we should actively aim to replace religion with good mental health, though my OP maybe reads that way. Rather I'm saying that as society gets better at understanding mental health (which seems to be happening now), will more people have less need to turn to religion to get their support? That can be only a good thing.
Secondly, religion may help people's mental health, but it comes with a lot of baggage, and also requires people to believe in things that there is no strong independent evidence for. If we can get the same positive without the baggage, then what's wrong with that?
To use your analogy, it is like someone who thinks that eating lots of vegetables while spending 30 mins staring at the food before eating and 30 minutes tapping their stomach after is healthy. Instead I'm saying just eat healthy and forget about the rest of the irrational stuff that does not have evidence to support it.
Or to put it another way will society move away from the placebo and towards the actual treatment?
The bolded above is a good way to put it. I KNOW for a fact, from my experience, that the wrong kind of religious belief can be devastating to one's mental health, especially if a problem already exists. Talk about adding insult to injury. There is an excessive amount of baggage as mentioned that comes with religion.....too many rules, demands, forced thinking, brainwashing....imo religion can exacerbate an already difficult situation.
I disagree though about the mental health crisis being addressed, it got exceedingly worse thanks to the pandemic and the tremendous overuse of social media. People are suffering and the mental health field is struggling to keep up.
Being mentally ill still has a huge stigma attached to it. There is no amount of 'prayer' that can make it better, only therapy and meds. You cannot help people who do not recognize their illness. Plain and simple. And they will not help themselves either. I'm watching 3 people I know deteriorate into madness because they won't seek treatment. I don't think doing nothing but praying is going to help. One has to take action or a family member needs to do it for them.
There is a wide range of the types of mental illness. Just like with any other diseases like cancer, there are so many different kinds. It takes a lot of time spent with a therapist and getting one's meds adjusted. And just when you think you're in a good place, the meds need to be adjusted again. It's an ongoing, lifelong process and you can't pray it away. Take action, not give the old "I'll pray for you" bs. Be the best you can be, even if it takes meds to do that. Quality of life is important.
The bolded above is a good way to put it. I KNOW for a fact, from my experience, that the wrong kind of religious belief can be devastating to one's mental health, especially if a problem already exists. Talk about adding insult to injury. There is an excessive amount of baggage as mentioned that comes with religion.....too many rules, demands, forced thinking, brainwashing....imo religion can exacerbate an already difficult situation.
I disagree though about the mental health crisis being addressed, it got exceedingly worse thanks to the pandemic and the tremendous overuse of social media. People are suffering and the mental health field is struggling to keep up.
Being mentally ill still has a huge stigma attached to it. There is no amount of 'prayer' that can make it better, only therapy and meds. You cannot help people who do not recognize their illness. Plain and simple. And they will not help themselves either. I'm watching 3 people I know deteriorate into madness because they won't seek treatment. I don't think doing nothing but praying is going to help. One has to take action or a family member needs to do it for them.
There is a wide range of the types of mental illness. Just like with any other diseases like cancer, there are so many different kinds. It takes a lot of time spent with a therapist and getting one's meds adjusted. And just when you think you're in a good place, the meds need to be adjusted again. It's an ongoing, lifelong process and you can't pray it away. Take action, not give the old "I'll pray for you" bs. Be the best you can be, even if it takes meds to do that. Quality of life is important.
Regarding mental health, it is not accurate to claim that "only therapy and meds can help make it better."
The medical profession, and mental health clinicians and providers, utilize and recognize the effectiveness of a much wider range and scope of treatment modalities that includes far more than just those two options.
Also: Part of reducing the stigma, is awareness of the language used when discussing mental health, and words to avoid such as "mentally ill". Here are resources from Behavioral Health provider, 7 terms to avoid when talking about mental illnesses, and better ones to use,
and research, Why you should never use the term 'the mentally ill'
Last edited by Tzaphkiel; 11-10-2022 at 08:43 AM..
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