Jehovah’s Witnesses Gone Wild!
What happens when a Jehovah’s Witness experiences a psychotic break?
Many go on a drug, alcohol or sex filled binge and completely ruin their lives in the process. Some even go so far as committing suicide.
Some…take it even further.
Most of us are aware of the recent attack at a New Orleans airport where Richard White chased a TSA officer armed with a machete, a barbecue lighter, and six Molotov cocktails.
What you may not know?
Richard White was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and had “refused certain types of medical care.” One has to make the assumption that this would include psychiatric care. As most of us are painfully aware, psychiatry has always been pointed to as a “man-made solution to a spiritual problem” by the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society.
Could the Watchtower’s open condemnation and even ridicule of psychiatric treatment have contributed to this tragedy which, if not for the heroic actions of TSA officers, could have been much worse?
Note the following quotations:
Awake! 1960 March 8 p.27
“As a rule, for a Christian to go to a worldly psychiatrist is an admission of defeat, it amounts to ‘going down to Egypt for help.’ Isaiah 31:1. Often when a Witness of Jehovah goes to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist will try to persuade him that his troubles are caused by his religion, entirely overlooking the fact that the Christian witnesses of Jehovah are the best-oriented, happiest and most contented group of people on the face of the earth. They have the least need for psychiatrists. Also, more and more psychiatrists are resorting to hypnosis, which is a demonic form of worldly wisdom.”
Awake! 1975 August 22 p.25
“Is the turning of people from the clergy to the psychiatrists a healthy phenomenon? No, for it really is a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. They are worse off than they were before… That they are not the ones to go to for help when one is depressed and beset with all manner of problems is to be seen from the fact that suicides among them are twice as frequent as among the population in general… what is needed at such times is not worldly psychiatrists who may wholly ignore the change that the truth and God’s holy spirit have made in one’s life and who know nothing of their power to help one put on a new Christian personality. Rather, what is needed at such times is a mature Christian in whom one has confidence and who is vitally interested in one’s welfare and who will not shrink back from administering needed reproof or counsel so that one may get healed.”
As has been seen in the thousands of cases of pedophilia committed by even high ranking members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the subsequent failure of the body of elders and their corporate headquarters to adequately (and legally) address these crimes, the body of elders simply aren’t equipped to help anyone with serious psychological issues. Yet they continue to insist that they are.
What could the Watchtower have done, if anything, to prevent Richard White, a member in good standing, of “Jehovah’s organization on earth”, from getting to this state of mind and committing such an act?
I’m asking all of our past contributors to weigh in with their thoughts on how and why this could happen and what part, if any, they feel the Watchtower’s negligence in condemning the science of psychiatry played in this tragedy.
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Hi I'm Doug Shields.
I was a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses for twenty-three years of my life. I finally realized that they didn't have "the truth" and I left the organization.