I found the following story while researching the JW mindset and subsequent behavior due to their weekly exposure to mind control techniques. The story is a bit old but it does speak volumes in terms of the mental anguish the average JW teen must endure as a JW. Links to website and original newspaper follow:
The police say it was suicide
When our assignment of either writing a five-page document or saying a
five-minute speech came up for psychology class, I thought long, and
hard. It would be very easy to say a speech for five minutes to the
class and that would be over and done. As it is very hard for me to
talk to a group I considered writing. My topic will be depression.
A depression seems sometimes to mold a person's life. It is
responsible for how you feel, makes you have religious preoccupations
and worries about the meaning of life. When you are feeling very low it
is extremely hard to pick yourself up and continue on with the
necessary things of life. I have dwelt with depression for about 25
years. In order for you to understand, I have to tell you my story.
I was born in Stafford Springs, Connecticut in 1949. I was one among
10 children. My father was a paint contractor and wallpaper hanger. My
mother was a housewife. I was child number 6. I had five brothers and
was the fourth oldest of the four youngest. I also had three sisters.
In my childhood we lived in a house that was very old and needed a lot
of handiwork. The house was very cold and it had no running water.
Looking back to on this, I have a hard time to understand how my mother
dwelt with having all those children and so few conveniences.
When I was a really young baby, the Jehovah's Witnesses came into our
lives. The Jehovah's Witnesses prey upon people that are depressed,
have lost someone they loved, or sometimes after someone has been
involved in a very bad relationship. The Jehovah's witnesses go from
door to door preaching what they say is the good news of God's kingdom.
Many people are deceived because they will come to their door with a
smile on their face, a Bible in their hands, while talking about
paradise on earth. Of course this paradise on earth is very conditional
and it only belongs to that one limited group. Their religious belief
is that everybody who isn't a Jehovah's Witnesses will find himself or
herself killed at this great battle of Armageddon. In this religion you
are not allowed to do many things, celebrate the holidays, associate
with other people that are not Jehovah's witnesses, salute the flag, or
even sing patriotic songs. This religion is terribly controlling and it
is discriminating against the woman. The woman is to be in total
submission of the man as the man is the head of the household.
Another one of the beliefs that are very prevalent in the watchtower
system is that if you are married to a person that is not of the
watchtower and you are a woman you do not have to listen to this person.
I believe that is why mom got really entangled into this religion.
She needed an escape from the control and manipulation of her husband,
my father. Mom was very easygoing, very kind, generous, and caring.
Mom never did drive so she was caught in a situation where she had to
completely rely on someone to take her here or there. When Mom was
first converted to the Jehovah Witness religion Dad didn't go along with
it. Mom was always worried that Dad would be destroyed at the great
battle of Armageddon.
Life as a teenager for me was very trying. All of my classmates had
nice new homes, nice new cars, their parents had very good jobs, had
earned a lot of money. I didn't have very many friends in school
because I was a Jehovah Witness. I remember how much it used to bother
me because I wasn't allowed to salute the flag and everybody else did.
Saluting the flag is a real sin in their eyes. We were never taught as
children about the very real emotional part of us. We were taught to
live by rules and follow examples given by the watchtower.
In my high school years, I developed a rebellious nature. Everything I
wanted to do was wrong. No one ever asked me to go anywhere, or do
anything due to the strict rules. I just drifted along. In those days
we had no television, VCR, videos or games to play. In school I was
very quiet and never contributed anything to class discussions.
After I graduated from high school I married a man who was a
non-Jehovah's Witness, a drunkard and a wife beater. I lived in hell
for five long, lonely, years. The one good thing that came out of this
marriage was I had a very handsome young son. What a hard life we had.
No place to live and no food. My job didn't give us enough money to
survive on. Whenever my ex-husband worked all the money went for
drinking. My ex-husband was extremely jealous, possessive and whenever
anyone looked at me he would beat me up. I finally got a divorce, but
was deathly afraid of him and his actions.
My sister and her husband moved away from Connecticut in 1972. My
Father and Mother moved up to Wisconsin too. I had just gotten through
with a divorce, so I moved to Wisconsin with my young son Ron to start a
new life. What a surprise I was in for! When I moved up to Wisconsin,
I couldn't find a job. I went on welfare temporarily so that my Ron
and myself could be taken care of until I could find work.
Shortly after moving to Wisconsin my Mother introduced me to a man who
was a Jehovah witness. At that time in 1974 the Jehovah's Witnesses
were really strong into the belief that 1975 would be the end of the
world. I did not feel that I was worthy to be saved from Armageddon and
I thought for sure that I would be killed along with my young son
because we weren't Jehovah Witnesses. I believed that my fiancé to be
could save me from being destroyed, as well as I really wanted to have
another baby because I love children. So I married again. It wasn't
long before I had realized I made a mistake, my new husband hated my
young son Ron. He completely changed from being a loving man to being a
very controlling, manipulating man. It wasn't long before he took my
car away. He had a cabin for us to live in that was very isolated and
away from all other people. He wouldn't let us have a telephone. He
wouldn't let me drive any of his vehicles. Our whole life was comprised
of going to the kingdom hall of Jehovah's Witnesses; once in a while he
would let me go along to the store with him to buy groceries and
supplies. He wouldn't allow me to work away from him, or go to get
certain training so I could get a job. He wouldn't let me work in the
home care either. I felt so trapped, and I didn't know how to get out
of the situation, I stayed with it for 22 years. He was very mean to
Ron and abused him many times physically. Looking back on it now, I
don't know which is more addictive religion or alcohol.
My husband didn't have a job because the end of the world was
right around the corner and so why work? I finally convinced him that
we had to find a job to take care of ourselves. He decided to be a
logger, so we went into the logging business together. I bunched the
logs after he'd cut them. We also sold firewood and peeled poplar.
After a while, I learned to run the chain saw. As I was on welfare at
the time I couldn't earn any money so he took what money I earned and
put it on his check. We lived mostly off money I got from welfare. I
also got quite a lot of food stamps.
Our marriage produced four beautiful children. They were three boys
and one little girl. The whole family worked in the woods, as soon as
the kids were about one year old. I had to bundle them up very good
because it is very cold here in Northern Wisconsin. I would be working
and they would be close to my side. I had to always watch them, as I
was afraid they would get in the way of the falling trees. It usually
wasn't long until they were fussing because they were cold. I would have
to warm up the car by turning on the heater. He controlled all the
money. I worked for him for free for 12 years while I was on welfare.
On the income tax forms he never added my name so now I have very little
Social Security benefits during my current disability.
On August 30th, 1993 a major life event threw me into a deep, dark
depression. On that day, as usual I had to take care of my father who
had had a hip operation, and was very old. I left home early that
morning leaving my husband in the care of our three young children. When
I left to take care of my father I had clothes laid out for my youngest
daughter. She was five years old and could dress herself. I left at
about 7:05 and the school bus was supposed to come at 8:00. At quarter
to eight in the morning he called me at my father's house and told me he
couldn't find the two boys. They should be going to school on the bus.
I came home, looked around the house, and then I looked around the
grounds. There was no sign of the boys, then he said, "the car is
missing" I looked; sure enough the car was missing. It was a rainy day,
so of course I looked for tracks in the mud. The tracks in the mud
showed up plainly. I followed the tracks down the road and into the
trail; the Rail Trail is an old railroad bed that the kids use for
hiking, biking, and three wheeling. It is a recreational trail that
stretches from Prentice to Medford. I drove back home and told my
husband that the boys had driven down into the trail.
My husband took my daughter and me in his truck down Spring Road to the
beginning of the trail. He left us and walked in. He told us to wait
there for him. We waited anxiously in the truck for a while and I
wondered what to do. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to what
time it was. He was in there and I decided to get out of the truck and
walk down the trail to see if I could see anything. I walked about a
couple of telephone pole lengths and then I heard a gunshot. I hurried
back to the truck and drove in the trail. On my way down the trail I
saw my husband coming and he was crying. I got really worried then
said, "Where are the boys?" He said, "they're both dead and the gun is
there, they killed themselves." I went totally numb. I wasn't used to
dealing with death and no one had died in my family since I was a little
girl of eight years old. I went into shock. I couldn't function.
Things kept running through my mind. It was the last thing I had
expected. How do you deal with losing two of your precious young sons
at one time? Well the days when by slowly and my depression got very
deep. I really didn't want to live and the quiet of the grave seemed
very enticing at that time. There would be relief from the great mental
anguish of such a loss that most couldn't ever comprehend unless it
happened to them. Life kept going on and somehow I managed to keep
doing the things that have to be done for the rest of the family. The
whole area was in an uproar. Nobody could believe such a horrible thing
could happen. The media was after me constantly because they had never
heard of two little boys ending their lives that way.
Even after six years the pain I feel from this gets very
intense and it is always there. There isn't one single day that I wake
up in the morning and don't think about my two little boys and why that
happened. The police say it was suicide, a double suicide but the case
is still open. The police say each boy killed himself. The police had
an investigation where they hired 10 special detectives who were used to
dealing with this kind of thing and they all got together and tried to
figure out what happened. To this day over six years later I still
don't know for sure what happened that day, on the trail;
And I don't know if I will ever really know the truth.
In my mind, I blame the Jehovah's Witnesses because their whole
religion is based upon death. They believe in a very vengeful God, an
angry God. This angry God hates everybody who isn't a Jehovah's
Witnesses and will kill them. This includes the children because their
parents don't believe what the people from the watchtower told them. I
found later on in the boys Watchtower literature that was in their
Watchtower briefcase that they took to the Kingdom Hall, an actual map
of the location of the suicides. There is only one way for salvation in
that churches eyes and that is to be a Jehovah's Witnesses. There's
also another way to escape the horrible bottle of Armageddon and that is
to die before Armageddon. If anyone dies before Armageddon, they are
guaranteed to live in a paradise earth. Did my little boys die because
they wanted to live?
As I go through, all this pain and suffering; I am worried about my
young daughter going through the same things that my boys had to go
through, due to the Watchtower teachings of fear. There was only one
way that I could make it through the rest of this life and that was to
go through a second miserable divorce. I hired a lawyer because I
absolutely had to have sole custody of my daughter plus I didn't want
her involved with the Jehovah's Witnesses. The Watchtower Organization,
that is the head of the Jehovah's Witnesses lined up one of their
expert people to help the ex-husband testify against me. They used
someone all the way from New York. In the end I did get sole custody
with one exception. The one exception was that on my ex-husbands time,
he had the right to have religious interaction with her. He could take
her to his religious meetings with him. She didn't like it but was
forced to go with him on his visiting time, which is every other
weekend. The divorce was very stressful, as he wanted joint custody.
The divorce took a very long year to complete. My daughter had a
guardian ad lithem, a social worker, whom both advised the judge that my
daughter shouldn't have to be forced to go to the watchtower. My
daughter is twelve years old and we are still involved in this religious
conflict.
This life has been a real hard lesson. If I could do it again I would
do it completely different. First of all, when I was young, I would
have been a lot more interested in my studies. My parents never taught
us how important an education really was because the watchtower frowned
upon getting an education. The watchtower hates to have people educated
because then they will leave. The watchtower cannot control an educated
person. They knew if the people were educated they wouldn't believe all
the lies they heard.
Depression is treated by psychotherapy, sometimes medications. When
one treatment is ineffective, it is likely that another one will be
successful. For me, I found that optimism is sometimes good medicine.
Usually life is exactly what you make of it. I deal with this problem
one day at a time. This is a true story. It is also confidential.
Before I went to college, I worked for a company called the Great
Northern Cabinetry. Because I had no education and no skills except for
working in the woods, they had me hand-standing cabinet doors and
cabinet parts all day long plus overtime. I developed carpal tunnel, tendinitis in both arms and wrist tendinitis in both wrists. I am
permanently disabled now. The DVR bought me a voice-activated computer
and now I am taking classes to become an administrative assistant so
that I can take care of my young daughter and myself. I feel finely I'm
on the way to a better life.
Roberta Moore
January 29, 2000
Story taken from: Click here for website
Original news story: Click here for story