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Exposing Psychology, Exalting Christ |
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| Psychiatrist blames Utah’s suicide rate on religion--not high antidepressant use[Copied from SSRI Crusaders Newsgroup in its entirety] The following press release was sent to the Salt Lake Tribune on May 3, 2005. Feel free to forward it to your email list. Sandra Lucas, ED CCHR Utah Are psychiatrists trying to cover up the reason why Utah has the highest rate of suicide than the rest of the Nation by blaming the prominent religion of the State? In a recent Salt Lake Tribune article, Michael Measom, a local psychiatrist, expresses gladness that the use of antidepressants is higher in Utah, but has no explanation for the suicide rates being the highest as well. Measom points the finger at the LDS religion for putting too much pressure on males to succeed. He also theorizes that Mormons have too many children and can't afford them, which he says leads to a high level of stress ending up in suicide. Another doctor impunes the genetic makeup of Mormons as being faulty. But what of the latest information released in 2004 by the FDA and Congress? The actions implemented as a result of hearings were decisive: antidepressants must now have a black box warning stating that they can cause children to attempt suicide. An examination of 702 controlled clinical trials revealed in February of this year that adults taking antidepressants are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as patients who ingest sugar pills! So, if antidepressants cause people to kill themselves, wouldn't the highest use of antidepressants equal the highest rate of suicide? To blame the LDS faith is yet another in-your-face example that psychiatry is no friend to religion. The first psychologist to separate psychology from the field of religion, German Wilhelm Wundt, declared in 1879 that the soul was a "waste of energy" and that man was simply another animal. His bold declaration was echoed by his follower, John Dewey, who wrote in the Humanist Manifesto in 1933 that religion had lost its significance and was powerless to solve the problems of human living in the 20th Century. A new and "improved" 1973 edition of the Human Manifesto stated, "belief in a prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproven and outmoded faith. there is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body." Wundt and his followers were not the only ones who strongly believed that religion needed to be attacked and destroyed. In 1940, psychiatrist John Rawlings Rees, Co-Founder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) addressed a council of mental hygiene stating: "Since the last World War we have done much to infiltrate the various social organizations throughout the country. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church." Five years later, another Co-Founder of WFMH, Canadian psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, said that "if the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be the psychiatrist who take the original responsibility." Sixty years after this statement, the plan has apparently worked, with religion losing ground. Where it was once understood that man's emotional travail was intrinsically tied to spiritual suffering, we have been told to accept that everything is ruled by brain chemicals. Supposedly, all one needs to do is swallow a pill and all should be well. Why bother visiting a bishop, a minister or a priest, when there is a "mental health professional" at just about every corner who can write a prescription for the chemical fixing pills? This concerted attack on religion can be ignored at a parishioners' own peril. Ten years ago, the then-director of Utah Division of Mental Health, Meredith Alden, gave a talk at the University of Utah School of Medicine titled, " Mental Health Referrals by Bishops". During this speech, Alden stressed the importance of overcoming the barriers that keep bishops from referring their flock to the "professionals", and she laid out a marketing plan to accomplish that goal. It is not unusual now to hear spiritual leaders talk about chemical imbalances of the brain being responsible for unwanted actions, even criminal acts. Who can blame them? For decades they have been pounded with lies and deceit. No one has bothered to tell them that the chemical imbalance theory is only that: A THEORY. There are no scientific tests that can be done to prove that a person has a chemical imbalance. In the natural desire to help a suffering parishioner it is easy to forget that adhering to such an unproven idea is antithesis to any religion, which teaches that man possesses free will and is responsible for his actions. How clever! What better way to destroy a religion than working on the inside. A word of warning to religious leaders: watch out for the wolf in sheep's clothing, he is diagnosing your faithful with a chemical imbalance, feeding them antidepressants and blaming YOU for the deadly side effects.
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