Why Atheists Handle Mental Health Issues Better Than the Religious

Thank you for posting this.  My father suffered at the hands of a religious community during a manic episode, part of his bi-polar disorder.  The church “prayed the demons away,” which led him to stop taking his medication.  As you can imagine, this made everything get worse.  He refused to get treated, and we (his family) were unable to have him committed for treatment until we found a suicide note, that led to a police man-hunt to find him. 

As a Christian teenager, watching all this from the sidelines and praying for divine intervention, this was probably the first experience in my life to shake my superstitious belief in God.  Yes, atheists handle mental health issues better than the religious.  Religion simply piles more issues on top of an already-hurting person, feeding into their grandiose delusions (health/wealth gospel) or making them feel more depressed (sin doctrine).

Really glad to see someone speaking up about this. When I went through a major depression years ago I had a really hard time finding a therapist that wasn’t focusing on God and Christianity in their practice.

http://goo.gl/uS7SU

Naturally it’s more helpful and responsible to support people and advise them to seek counseling and medical treatment than to tell them they’re just being irresponsible* and they need to be more Godly.

*http://www.stufffundieslike.com/2012/07/sfl-flashback-blaming-mental-illness-on-sin/

Wow, atheists saying that atheists are better than religious people at something.  Didn’t see that one coming. Ever notice how so much of modern atheism is based on that?  It reminds me of an old Charlie Brown cartoon.  Charlie Brown and Schroeder (the kid who always played the piano) were in a brutal argument, calling each other names, insulting each other, putting each other down.  Finally one of the girls walks up and asks what they are arguing about.  They stop and look at her and explain that they are arguing who is better: Davey Crocket or Beethoven.  As she walks away, she overhears them continue with the insults: who’s a lousy baseball player?  You are!  She gives a puzzled look.  I notice that so much of modern atheism appears to hope that by gerrymandering this or twisting and turning that (if not outright appeals to ignorance and lack of information), they can convince people that the actual truth claims of atheism or religion have absolutely everything to do with its adherents. Of course they don’t.  But you’d never notice it given the thousand to one emphasis on things like this you see in so many atheist circles.   FWIW, it’s a lesson that not a few religious individuals also would do well to learn.

Already having one fewer mental issue to deal with makes it easier.

I have to say, BEING an atheist with mental illness has been for me far easier than being a Christian with mental illness.  I’ve now been through two cycles of severe depression, the first when I was still a Christian, the second after becoming an atheist.  When I was a Christian I was fortunate enough to still be given evidence based therapy and medication, rather than the various BS things some religious people promote, but it was still harder to deal with.

It is far harder to perseverate on the idea that god has given/allowed you to have this burden and wonder why; if you did something to deserve it or are being tested or what.  It is much easier to accept that it’s just a bad luck confluence of genetics and environment causing a biological disease.

Also, when many of your coping mechanisms are rather unhealthy, it’s hard enough to deal with the consequences of the unhealthy behaviors without the added guilt of believing many of them to be “sinful”

Those would all be valid points if Brendan was arguing that atheism is true because it helps you cope with mental illness better. He wasn’t, though, and so they’re not.

I am glad I never had to go through that. I had 3 therapists between 11-16 and all three were extremely professional and never ever brought religion into it. The psychiatrist I have no never mentions it either. Maybe it is because I live in a city and not the bible belt, but I am sure there are instances of that in other areas besides The Belt. 

 You have clearly not watched the talk, and merely read the headline. Congratulations!

Of course he isn’t.  Atheists never do, because it would be ridiculous to do so.  But yet, the bulk of modern atheist arguments center around how superior atheists are or how inferior religious endeavors are. 

Congratulations on your transition! I’m happy you were able to find someone to help you.

I agree: It is a great disservice to paint any group with a broad brush. That leads to only seeing (and elevating) superficial commonalities and failing to realize that individuals have their own views and opinions. It also leads to over-simplifying and completely misconstruing what “they” believe.

Nice trick, you get to look down on atheists and theists at the same time.

I’m impressed you’ve managed to generate enough straw men to populate a small straw country. Or perhaps it’s just that I missed the 50 million arguments you were talking about.

[citation needed]

And much of it is the intellectually suspect approach of assuming atheism is true in the first place.

If there weren’t enough evidence already to show that you’re a complete idiot, the scales have now tipped.

This is a non-theist talking to other non-theists – there is no reason to rehash arguments against theism to a bunch of people who already think that theism is false. Your complaint is like whining to a church that they have just assumed that God is real, and the only reason that their discussions of sin and repentance make any sense is if you make that assumption beforehand. This is true but a pretty ridiculous argument to make: when there is a shared belief among a group of people, it makes no sense to continually contest that belief.

Actually, it’s easy to google “Alcoholics Anonymous Effectiveness” and find things like ”
2006 Cochrane systematic review by Ferri et a,” and lots more.  Essentially, AA is maybe 40% as effective as anything else, including deciding to just stop without God’s help. Unless, of course, Google is just another tool of Satan, which means no Christian can ever use it to look up information ever again.  Yes, this is only one example, but apparently God bats kinda low on this field, and history, and science, and biology — care to go on?

Kindly stop strawmanning and pay attention to, and discuss the actual content of my talk. You are doing absolutely NO service to the sufferers of mental illness in this thread who’ve come out and thanked me for bringing this issue to light, within the context of secularism. You are a distraction, and you are moving the goalposts miles away from the intent of my talk.

Even if the fundamental assumptions of religion that I addressed were true – mind/body dualism, roots of mental illness and mental health having a metaphysical component, etc. – it can be shown and proven that secular medical care still provides statistically better results. Because we are not dealing with a theoretical reality in which evidence-based care is insufficient, we are dealing with a reality where evidence-based care is both necessary and sufficient.

The evidence for the greater effectiveness of secular care is indeed evidence against the relevant fundamental assumptions of religion and spirituality here. If these assumptions are true, why does ignoring explicitly metaphysical components work? Why can we dismiss spirits, demons, and the lot of woo and still achieve effective care? This is not the primary argument I was making, but it certainly is a corollary.

Now, what others said here is right. I was addressing other non-theists, and telling them to either a) stand up and be counted if you have a mental illness, or (especially) b) stand up and be a nonreligious advocate for those with mental illness, and fight against damaging, unhelpful care currently pathological in the psychological care system.

If you cannot support that primary message, you are a useless troll.

 This has basically been my experience, except when I was a Christian I didn’t get any actual treatment. I was instead sent to talk to the youth pastor and she just gave me warm platitudes about god and told me to pray with her and pray more on my own. Of course, this only increased my depression because it made me feel like it was my fault for not believing or praying hard enough. Ridiculous bullshit is ridiculous.

Dr. Stephen Joseph, from the University of Warwick, said: “Religious
people seem to have a greater purpose in life, which is why they are
happier. Looking at the research evidence, it seems that those who
celebrate the Christian meaning of Christmas are on the whole likely to be happier:

A meta-analysis of all studies, both published and unpublished, relating
to religious involvement and longevity was carried out in 2000.
Forty-two studies were included, involving some 126,000 subjects. Active
religious involvement increased the chance of living longer by some
29%, and participation in public religious practices, such as church
attendance, increased the chance of living longer by 43%.

In an article also published in this issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings,
Mayo Clinic researchers reviewed published studies, meta-analyses,
systematic reviews and subject reviews that examined the association
between religious involvement and spirituality and physical health,
mental health, health-related quality of life and other health outcomes.
The authors report a majority of the nearly 350 studies of physical
health and 850 studies of mental health that have used religious and
spiritual variables have found that religious involvement and
spirituality are associated with better health outcomes

Teen Challenge claims of a 70% cure rate for the drug addicts graduating
from their program attracted the attention of the U.S. Federal
Government in 1973. Most secular drug rehabilitation programs only
experienced a cure rate of 1-15% of their graduates. The National
Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the U.S. Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, funded the first year of this study to evaluate
the long term results of the Teen Challenge program.

Dr. Martin urged that a great cause of suicide was atheism. It was, he
said, a remarkable fact that where atheism prevailed most, there
suicides were most numerous. In Paris,
a recent census showed one suicide to every 2,700 of the population.
After the publication of Paine’s “Age of Reason” suicides increased.

In 2004, the American Journal of Psychiatry reported the following:

“Religiously
unaffiliated subjects had significantly more lifetime suicide attempts
and more first-degree relatives who committed suicide than subjects who
endorsed a religious affiliation. Unaffiliated subjects were younger,
less often married, less often had children, and had less contact with
family members. Furthermore, subjects with no religious affiliation
perceived fewer reasons for living, particularly fewer moral objections
to suicide. In terms of clinical characteristics, religiously
unaffiliated subjects had more lifetime impulsivity, aggression, and
past substance use disorder. No differences in the level of subjective
and objective depression, hopelessness, or stressful life events were
found