Sarah, Desejamos-lhe o melhor em sua jornada de fé!

We wish you the best in your faith journey. Welcome back to the Church. I can hear perhaps some of the pain you have experienced along the way. Life and family and faith can be messy sometimes, can’t it?

My daughter is serving in Brazil right now as a missionary. She loves your country!

By learning and seeing many points of view, I was able to discuss with my parents, my brothers and my friends about my own worldview. I have expressed my doubts about my mormon faith in the past, and I have tried new ways of living as well, without my family knowing at the time. (They know a lot of what I did now, though.) But, after about 7 years of trials and new begginings and experiences, I have found that I feel the happiest when I’m following the mormon religion.

Now, maybe that’s me going back to what’s confortable – living the things I was taught when I was young, going to church with my family.
Maybe my brain just likes the familiar.
Maybe it’s guilt from leaving the church.
Maybe it’s an effort to make my parents happy and at ease.
Maybe I really do feel like the best version of myself when I’m praying, fasting, reading the scriptures and serving in church.
Maybe I really understood and loved the Plan of Salvation that the church teaches. I hope I can be with my family forever!

And, well. Maybe it’s all of the above! But my truth is this: this moment of my life, I feel very fulfilled going back to church. I have had sexual adventures, questioned my sexuality, drank and gone to parties and have studied other religions and philosophies (and still will continue doing so). But now, as I am back to church, and re-learning things, I feel happy. I can see progress in myself in addictions and have many activities to see friends and hang out to do fun, healthy things. It’s very undescribable, how in peace I feel. Again, maybe it’s just my brain, and not something spiritual – but hey! Religion has been around for so long, in so many different shapes and forms. If it’s able to comfort and bring peace like that, I hope everyone finds a religion that fills their life with peace and meaning, like I have bee re-finding in the mormon church.

I still think Utah has a long way to go, though. In a place where so many people are from the same religion, kids will grow up feeling very pressured to fit in. Questioning is something whe start doing as kids, and will continue doing our whole lives (hopefully!). But very religios parents can shut down questions, and just make their children live a way of living they don’t fully understand, or fully agree with living. If you are a mormon mom or dad reading this, please. Raise your children in a family where questions are welcome, and not censored. Let them think, process and discuss their findings with you. Let them be angry, sad, confused, just as much as you let them be happy and glad with what they learn. Finally, give them space to be their own person, even if they decide to leave the church. They might come back in the future, and find out they like life better in church – but they definately won’t do that if you fill them up with trauma regarding mormonism, or their own family.

Also, anti-drepressants: I don’t know much about those, but I believe in a state where there are many expectations from peers, and plenty of homophobia and racism, anti-depressants will be needed. In one side, I’m glad people being affected by depression and anxiety are taking care of their mental health. On the other hand, I’m disappointed to see that Utah still suffers from blind christians who shove people who don’t fit their perfect narrative to the side. I’m glad this generation is learning to be truly inclusive and loving.

Anyway, tl;dr: I’m coming back to mormonism, and I feel really glad at the moment. I love serving and teaching and I’m seeing a lot of personal progress in personal issues. My rant is over! Hope you all have wonderful days. And forgive my English.

Now to your points.

First of all, it sounds like you are not happy yourself with Mormonism at some level. I’m sorry about that. The other comment from “John” about not agreeing with Mormons being happy also suggests to me that you are not happy or have had negative experiences within the Church. I hope you are able to find some peace for yourself, whatever that may look like.

I’ll address something mentioned in the other comment on the post about Mormons being happy here as well. I do sometimes see people hiding emotions in our midst, but I also think this is often a human condition. If you have ever read materials from Brené Brown, for example, you would see that a lack of vulnerability is most certainly not a Mormon problem. It’s a human problem.

To your comment above:
Of course there are high-LDS populations in Utah. But stats are stats and if people want to study the LDS population, they can’t generalize Utah-centric data as being reflective of Mormons in general. It’s just not good stats practice.

““Mormons don’t use drugs. That’s why we are depressed.” Really? Really?! ”

That isn’t what I said, but I see that I probably could have explained what I meant more clearly. Depression is a mental illness and people the world over struggle with it. Sometimes people deal with mental illness by self-medicating through unhealthy substances or behaviors. Sometimes people use medication (and the researcher mentioned above noted that that approach may be used by a population with higher levels of education or income). The point relates to point #4 which is that correlation (antidepressant use in Utah) is not causation (Mormonism “causes depression” and is to be “blamed” for high antidepressant use).

Also, using antidepressant use as a negative measure could be measuring exactly the wrong things when it comes to reducing the stigma around mental illness.

And yes, sometimes people overuse antidepressants or can get addicted to those. But once again, that doesn’t mean that the LDS faith *causes* such addictions or depression. Again, statistics would require that you back up your claims with data.

So this claim –“If we take a step back and look at our LDS friends and family members, can we honestly say we don’t see a higher presence of depression than in our non-member friends?” cannot be made subjectively. It would require a randomized, large-enough sample to determine whether this could be backed up by data.

That is not to say that subjective experience isn’t valid. Again, I’m sorry that your experiences seem to fall more into the negative category.

The world has a news flash for you… you aren’t fooling anyone. With Utah consistently leading the USA in depression diagnoses and depression medication distribution, we can see very clearly what is really going on.

What really fascinates me is how Mormons always seem to THINK the rest of the world views them as “oh so happy”. Do they really believe that is how they are viewed? Or is it more like wishful thinking?

http://mormonwoman.org/2012/01/08/mormons-and-depression-mental-illness-anti-depressant-use/