My neighbors told me this story. They got a Newfoundland dog for nothing because she had a genetic defect and wasn't expected to live for more than a year or two. They were walking the dog when someone they didn't know walked up to the dog and put her hands on it. The woman then said. "Your dog was sick, but I fixed her". The dog lived to a ripe old age. Well, a ripe age for a hundred and fifty pound dog.
LisaRose
JoinedPosts by LisaRose
-
70
Did I open the gate to the realm of demons?
by redpilltwice inthis is what happened.
i had a sore tendon in my wrist.
i could work with it, but nevertheless the pain was there.
-
-
-
28
What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members
by 060702015 inthere seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.
apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.
jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.
-
-
LisaRose
Not sure why you think this is an inevitable outcome of such disorders.
I don't, not at all. Things arent as bad as they used to be, but there is still a stigma to being mentally ill and an attitude that the religion should be enough to fix your problems. I have been out for a while, but from what I read here, things havent changed that much, its not acceptable to admit you are unhappy.
Given the distrust of "worldly" authority, the belief that they live in a "spiritual paradise" and their fear of "bringing reproach upon Jehovah", its not hard to make a case that Jehovahs Witnesses are less likely to get adequate mental health care than average. So using only statistics on how many Jehovahs Witness seek mental health care is not really a good indicator of whether they actually have more or less mental illness than average. -
28
What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members
by 060702015 inthere seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.
apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.
jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.
-
-
LisaRose
The criterion for mental illness and depression was that the person had been admitted to a mental hospital or had been treated by a psychiatrist. That is an objective criterion and you do not need to understand mental illness to reach the conclusions he did.
As everyone knows, the religion discourages people from consulting psychologists or psychiatrists, so that you can't reliably use this as criteria for determining mental illness in this religion. Someone who is experienced in these kind of studies and impartial would have figured that out, but Rolf is not impartial and not experienced, he is too close to the subject to see clearly.
Jehovah's Witnesses are told that just about any problem can be fixed by more study, meetings, prayer and field service and to be wary of "worldly" therapists. I know of many Jehovah's Witnesses that were obviously suffering from some kind of mental illness but who never got treatment of any kind. Elders have no training in therapy or counseling and are not qualified to determine if someone needs treatment, and most JWs will consult an elder before going to any kind of therapy.
And your statement that you don't need experience in mental health to interpret statistics on mental health is patently ridiculous. As the Mark Twain quote goes, there are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies and statistics. Statistics have to be interpreted to be meaningful, and how good can the interpretation be if the person involved has no training in the field and worse, is obviously biased?
This whole study is a fraud in my opinion.
-
28
What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members
by 060702015 inthere seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.
apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.
jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.
-
-
LisaRose
As an example, my daughter was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. She began to have mental health issues by age fourteen and so wasn't qualified for baptism, if she had been baptized she would have been disfellowshipped for suicide attempts. She would not have counted in any statistical study of the congregation, they could say they didn't have any mentally ill in the congregation and been truthful, but their practices make that kind of statistical analysis meaningless.
As another example, I knew of a Jehovah's Witnesses who began hearing voices, a sign of schizophrenia. He was disfellowshipped, as they assumed he was demonized.
The study is meaningless because they shoot their wounded.
-
28
What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members
by 060702015 inthere seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.
apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.
jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.
-
-
LisaRose
do not know of any study carried out on the mental health of ex-Witnesses and have no idea how that could be done with any reliability.
Exactly. Which is why Rolf's study is less than worthless.
Picking congregations at random does not make up for the obvious bias of the person doing the study. Being a lecturer in Semitic studies does not qualify you to do a study on mental health, it's frankly laughable. He may mean well but what are his credentials in mental health? What are his credentials in statistical analysis? Was this even peer reviewed?
You are talking about a religion where it is not acceptable to be unhappy, much less admit to mental illness, so how accurate could any casual study actually be? And in a religion that disfellowships people for bad conduct, how meaningful is any one time study anyway? Anyone seriously mentally ill will soon get disfellowshipped, which is going to skew the results. You would have to do a long term study from birth to determine how many actually became mentally ill, which I doubt was done here.
I don't even know how he got this published. It would be very interested to know how that happened.
-
26
Are gays really condemned in the Bible?
by jws inso i was having this argument with a friend about the westboro baptist idiots.
my point is that while they are horrible people, they are pretty much right in that the bible is against gays because it has verses in both the old and the new testament.
which is one of many reasons to reject the bible as merely man-made rules from ancient middle-easterners.. and she argued that there are problems in translation, etc.
-
-
LisaRose
I think the bible clearly does condemn homosexuality, but then it also very clearly condemns a lot of things. Most Christian religions these days have adopted a position of following the spirit of Christ's teachings without necessarily following the bible to the letter, and I think that is a good thing. Even in early Christian days there were different interpretations of things, so why shouldn't there be now? Even very fundamentalist religions like the JWs pick and choose what things they get their undies in a bunch about, so no group can really say they follow the bible perfectly anyway.
Jesus said of a prostitute that "he who is without sin should cast the first stone", clearly indicating a moving away from the Jewish practice of following laws to the letter. In view of what we know now about homosexuality, that it isn't a choice, I think many Christians see that the more compassionate choice is to leave it up to the conscience of the individual.
I have read the accounts of many gay Jehovah's witnesses and seen their struggle, their feelings of worthlessness and guilt, it's heartbreaking. No matter how hard they tried or how much they prayed they couldn't be other than what they were and they suffered for it because of the religion's harsh stance. To condemn them and treat them as unworthy of love and acceptance is to me the less Christian path.
-
28
What is the current suicide and mental illness rate among JWs and previous members
by 060702015 inthere seems to be no current data on this information and there is questions concerning the validation of past data.
apparently there is high rate of mental illness and suicide.
jehovahs witnesses suicide rate 5 to 10 times above average.
-
-
LisaRose
Rolf Furili was a lecturer in Semtic languages, at Oslo University and is a Jehovah's Witness, so this entire study is highly questionable. His chief claim to fame prior to this was defending the Watchtower's questionable fall of Babylon chronology, he is not an expert in the field of mental illness and he has an obvious bias. This is a shameful attempt by the Watchtower to hide their problem with Mental illness and suicide, they have shown in the past that they will use dishonest methods like this to prop up their beliefs.
From / Wikipedia
Furuli has attempted to defend the religious views of Jehovah's Witnesses—of which Furuli is a member[3]—including their view that Jerusalem was destroyed by theBabylonians in 607 BC rather than the broadly recognised dating of its destruction in 587 BC.[4]
Also from Wikipedia
In a 2004 issue of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Lester L. Grabbe, professor of theology at the University of Hull, said of Furuli's study: "Once again we have an amateur who wants to rewrite scholarship. ... F. shows little evidence of having put his theories to the test with specialists in Mesopotamian astronomy and Persian history."[5]
-
12
Headaches vs. Migraines
by Coded Logic ina while back a coworker was telling me she had a migraine in the morning and had to take some aspirin before coming to work.
i was like, "yeah, that wasn't a migraine dear.
that was just a headache.
-
-
LisaRose
Not all migraine headaches involve debilitating pain, but they do usually involve more than just head pain. A few times I got a weird migraine that affected the vision in one eye. The very center of my vision was completely out of focus in a sawtooth pattern. I was alarmed until my husband told me he gets the same thing occasionally. It went away after a few hours.
-
17
Happy Birthday smiddy
by smiddy inand a happy birthday to anybody else who born on the 5/7 month.
smiddy.
-
-
LisaRose
Happy Birthday
🎉🎶🍸👑🎂
-
41
Convention Weirdness
by BlackWolf inwell i just got back from 3 days in hell, and geez was this convention strange or what?
im sure someone's probably made a topic about this already but i can't believe that there weren't any new releases besides the movies.
has that ever happened before?
-
-
LisaRose
I Remember this kind of speculation forty years ago in the run up th 1975, parsing out what was said and not said at the conventions, silly speculation about what it might mean.
They love it when people read between the lines and start speculating, I think they actually want people to do that. Of course they never say anything themselves that they can be held accountable for later. They have been at this game for well over a hundred years, so why shouldn't they be good at it?
I remember my mother telling me "brother Dimwit says Armageddon must be close, and he's and elder so he must know". I thought it was pathetic, I had begun to realize how much hope made people gullible. They weren't happy in their current life, they NEEDED it to be over soon and need made them willing to grasp at any hint.