Lee Marsh, a former Jehovah’s Witness, a retired Canadian counselor and president of Advocates for Awareness of Watchtower Abuses, spent years inside an abusive marriage, one she was coerced to stay in. She had been sexually abused as a child — first by her father, later by her mother’s partner — and both times the matter was handled by elders at her Kingdom Hall rather than by police.
By her thirties she was depressed and suicidal while her family looked, from the outside, entirely fine. When she finally asked the elders for permission to see a counselor, they granted it on one condition. She was forbidden to tell that counselor she was a Jehovah’s Witness.
Nobody Has to the Right to Forbid Therapy
Before anyone can ask for help, they need words for what is wrong. Authoritarian groups supply their own vocabulary, and it is always a vocabulary aimed at blaming the member if there are any issues or problems. It is never the leader or group’s fault.
For example, in Scientology, unwanted thoughts and feelings are entheta, a technical-sounding term for spiritual contamination. In the Moonies, we called it fallen nature. Regardless of the group or the term, what these labels share is that they locate the cause inside the sufferer’.
Different cults have different explanations of the cause of the problem (and the cure). It is never characterized as normal (like having sexual desire), or physiology, or an accident or bad luck. Never the leader, the doctrine or the policies of the group.
The result of this is that once a person’s distress has a doctrinal cause, the cure has to be doctrinal too. That is why the prescription is always more of what is not working. With religious cults, it is typically pray more, study daily, attend every meeting, and increase service to the group and its leadership. What members eventually infer from this is essentially if you were doing this properly, you would not feel this way.
Outright prohibition is the crude version of an anti-therapy attitude within cults. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, called psychiatrists unethical people who commit “extortion, mayhem, and murder” and Scientology has spent decades campaigning to eliminate all mental health approaches saying that the Scientology “tech” can fix all problems
The Jehovah’s Witness/Watchtower Society approach is far more common and, I would argue, more effective. It does not ban anything. Awake! told readers in 1960 that for a Christian to consult a worldly psychiatrist “is an admission of defeat,” described Jehovah’s Witnesses as the happiest and best-oriented people on earth with “the least need for psychiatrists.” They did manage to recruit some mental health professionals and directed members to these ideologically “pure” people. I interviewed Eilene Johnson who was recruited into Opus Dei and was sent to one of their psychiatrists who would never tell her to leave (the actual thing that was needed) but rather kept trying to distract and medicate her.
As we can see, the performance of happiness itself is a membership requirement. When I was in the Moonies, we were instructed to appear happy to outsiders at all times and to always offer a positive testimonial about the group. This was policy as any visible deviation was met with reprimand and retraining. This is the same phenomenon we recognize immediately in abusive relationships, where a partner insists publicly that everything is wonderful.
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.
— Awake! March 8, 1960
In 1988, the tone eventually softened, with the Watchtower taking a much more reasonable approach to psychiatry while still remaining suspicious of the “talking cure”, for an obvious reason.
“...Some therapists have even concluded that following the Bible’s strict moral code is the source of a person’s difficulties!” was the conclusion of the Watchtower.
And what “following the Bible’s strict moral code” is the source? It would seem that the Watchtower Society had a big problem and continues to take issue with their members seeking out help with any emotional issue that involves their beliefs.
The Closed Loop
When it comes to mental health within authoritarian cults, I see four walls. Firstly, a lay authority becomes the first responder. These are elders, bishops, or pastors. In ethical religious organizations, these leaders actually have formal training in basic counseling and are legally required to report abusive situations – and they do so.
In authoritarian cults, community leaders do not typically have mental health training. If they hear disclosures of abuse, suicidal thinking, or domestic violence, they check in with their superiors and have to do what they are told by the organization rather than to the person sitting in front of them.
The second wall that encloses a member in an authoritarian cult is that some sort of proprietary method replaces treatment. You may be encouraged, first, to pray more, reflect more, confess more. Maybe do confession. Maybe receive a “breaking session.” Or is told they need to be re-baptized.
The third wall ensures that outside professionals are pre-discredited, as described above. Any clinician who does not adhere to the organization’s doctrine is one that you are not allowed to see. In the healthier world clients always can get a second opinion, challenge advice they don’t think is helpful and exit the therapist without being threatened or harassed.
The fourth wall is that referral happens, it points inward. Approved help is help that will not contradict doctrine. You may be allowed, even encouraged to seek therapy, but the treatment comes from an insular network of pre-approved clinicians who align with the organization’s values. This is especially problematic if the mental health situation involves distress related to the being in the organization.
There is a further problem that members understand intuitively even when they cannot articulate it out loud. Inside the four walls, confidentiality may not even exist. A disclosure to an elder is a disclosure to a body with disciplinary power.
Lee Marsh eventually told the elders the truth about her situation and was disfellowshipped — formally expelled and shunned, with everyone in her congregation, including her own mother, obligated to cut her off.
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his book on Chinese Communist brainwashing called it the dispensing of existence when the group positions itself as the sole source of meaning and legitimacy. When you operationalize this through shunning, you get something closer to social death than simply leaving a church.
Witnesses who are born or raised in the cult have never known life outside the group, and indoctrination teaches them that there is only suffering and spiritual damnation outside it. If you are disfellowshipped, you can lose everything. If you are employed by a company managed and staffed by Witnesses, you will likely lose your job. Your family will not be allowed to speak to you. Your friends will disappear overnight. How can we expect this not to lead to a severe mental health crisis?
What This Does to Children
Children are especially vulnerable to this type of insular network. For example, Mormon (Latter-Day Saint, or LDS) doctrine teaches that children under eight cannot sin and are automatically saved — termed “the age of accountability.” Once you are baptized in the church, you are now responsible for your actions, and at risk of forever being separated from your family and cast into the “Outer Darkness.”
Multiple ex-Mormons have now described independently arriving, as very small children that dying before eight was safer than living past it and risking eternity apart from their families. The idea is common enough that an LDS Apostle has publicly addressed having had it himself as a boy.
A very small child is not likely to understand that such thoughts are a mental health issue, one that has come about directly as a result of the doctrine they have been taught. If they were to express these thoughts, they too, would be sent to an approved Mormon clinician.
It must be categorically stated that the LDS Church does not encourage suicide. However, what I am describing is an unintended consequence of black-and-white teaching delivered to children who are especially vulnerable to simplistic, black and white/ good vs. evil thinking.
When adults who join authoritarian groups leave, they have a previous identity to look for. Children born into these organizations have no such thing unless they have quality contact with non members.
Consider what it means to raise a child on apocalyptic imagery. In Witness households, books, magazines, videos, and talks from the platform return constantly to Armageddon and the destruction of everyone outside the organization. Children are told to live in expectation of it, that it could arrive any day. Every earthquake, flood, hurricane, tornado triggers this phobia indoctrination.
The developing brain does not treat this as theology. The amygdala evaluates threat and the hippocampus binds the fear to its context, and both are highly sensitive to chronic stress during childhood. Triggered daily, for years, it interferes with the very functions a child needs.
Most heartbreaking is that the children who most need help are the most vulnerable and the most likely to be expelled. The child who is gay, the child who is transgender, the child who is autistic, the child with a genuine psychiatric condition, the child who simply asks too many questions — these are the ones who get isolated, disciplined, and in many cases pushed out entirely. Many of these religious authoritarian cults use corporal punishment to program blind obedience to authority.
An organization that has positioned itself as the only legitimate source of care and interpretation systematically has to expel the members with the greatest clinical need, at the age when they have the fewest resources to survive it. Some of these young people run away. A number of them are picked up by traffickers, who offer food and shelter first and control second, and who are using recognizably similar techniques. They move from one high-control situation directly into another.
The Crisis of Exiting
Families tend to treat getting out as the finish line. In my experience it is frequently the beginning of the hardest year of a person’s life.
Depression is the single most commonly reported difficulty among former members, and it typically arrives in the first months after leaving. There is no gentle way to describe what it feels like to realize you were lied to and that your dream was a nightmare. Someone who leaves after two decades has to face the missed opportunities all at once — no degree, no career, no savings, no pension, often no partner, no children, and no relationship with the relatives who are still inside. The support network a person would normally lean on during a crisis of that size is precisely the thing they have just lost.
It also matters a great deal how someone leaves. People who walk out on their own terms, and people who receive skilled counseling on the way out, generally do better. People who are expelled are almost always in the worst condition. They feel rejected by the group, by everyone they loved in it, and in a religious organization, by God or a higher power. Many of them gave the group their money, their property, and their working lives on the understanding that they would be cared for forever.
Lee Marsh was granted permission to see a counselor on the condition that she conceal the single most important fact about her life. It was designed to make the therapy fail — to produce a woman who would drift away after a few unproductive months having learned firsthand that outside help does not work.
After she was disfellowshipped, she enrolled in college, thrived, and graduated with honors. She founded a nonprofit for survivors of incest and spent several years counseling. Eventually she researched her own experience and was able to name the phobias she had carried, unexamined, for decades.
This story shows what the Watchtower could not do. It could control Lee’s access, her vocabulary, and what she was permitted to disclose. However, it could not remove her capacity to recognize the truth.
Resources and Further Reading
Shunning and the BITE Model of Mind Control in the Jehovah’s Witnesses
Mental Health Issues Including Suicidal Feelings and Authoritarianism
High Control Groups Program Members to Fear Mental Health Help