Religion
Related: About this forumReligious Trauma Syndrome: How some organized religion leads to mental health problems
At age sixteen I began what would be a four year struggle with bulimia. When the symptoms started, I turned in desperation to adults who knew more than I did about how to stop shameful behaviormy Bible study leader and a visiting youth minister. If you ask anything in faith, believing, they said. It will be done. I knew they were quoting the Word of God. We prayed together, and I went home confident that God had heard my prayers.
But my horrible compulsions didnt go away. By the fall of my sophomore year in college, I was desperate and depressed enough that I made a suicide attempt. The problem wasnt just the bulimia. I was convinced by then that I was a complete spiritual failure. My college counseling department had offered to get me real help (which they later did). But to my mind, at that point, such help couldnt fix the core problem: I was a failure in the eyes of God. It would be years before I understood that my inability to heal bulimia through the mechanisms offered by biblical Christianity was not a function of my own spiritual deficiency but deficiencies in Evangelical religion itself.
Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion, written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms werent just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.
A few years ago, Winell made waves by formally labeling what she calls Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) and beginning to write and speak on the subject for professional audiences. When the British Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Psychologists published a series of articles on the topic, members of a Christian counseling association protested what they called excessive attention to a relatively niche topic. One commenter said, A religion, faith or book cannot be abuse but the people interpreting can make anything abusive.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/religious-trauma-syndrome-how-some-organized-religion-leads-to-mental-health-problems/
mr blur
(7,753 posts)- self-proclaimed and otherwise - will be along to explain how this is nonsense and how religion could never damage anybody.
jeff47
(26,549 posts)"Proper" being the way they use it.
eppur_se_muova
(36,289 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)However it is equally likely that this article will be reposted as it is trending high on google news religion.
bvf
(6,604 posts)edhopper
(33,615 posts)and all religions do not lead to mental health problems.
How could you make such a bigoted statement.
Atheists saying bad things about religion are worse than the most extreme fundamentalists.
Did I leave something out?
mr blur
(7,753 posts)Apparently, they're fair game according to Those In The Know.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)is losing us elections, and scaring people from the Democratic party, and preventing us from forming coalitions to solve all the world's problems.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)Otherwise, a dead-on impersonation.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Don't forget that one!
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)What if religion is a mental virus, a form of malware for our wetware?
I'm not saying it is, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. We know people are capable of mass delusions, suppose religions are a form of mass delusion that is capable of generational transmission (through indoctrination.) Many are comfortable with describing what happened to Germany in the 30's as a form of mass delusion, why do we dismiss the possibility that religion could operate in the same way?
edhopper
(33,615 posts)is the GOP delusions about Reagan a form of mental illness, or just willful ignorance.
Is Merkel's present obsession with austerity, counter to all the evidence a delusion?
UFO abductees? Believers in ESP?
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)We favor highly specific, academic definitions in informal discussions because reasons. Except when we're talking about agnosticism. Then we go by whatever some asshole on a street corner thinks that word means.
Major Nikon
(36,827 posts)LongTomH
(8,636 posts)I tell friends: "I had my head fucked up by experts!" I hate to tell you about some of the nights I've lain awake with terrors about what waited me after death!
No, not all religion is harmful; I have wonderful Christian and Jewish friends; but, I've been unchurched for decades. I keep saying that I'm going to try a Unitarian / Universalist service; but, I never get around to it.