I'm sure this must have been brought up on this board before, but the current media campaigns undertaken by the church reminded me of the 'Bounce Back' campaign that the church undertook in what I remember to be around 1985. If you were depressed, you could send for a cassette tape of craptastical Michael McLean music to help you 'Bounce Back'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQxPsoFUH4Q


As youth we were encouraged to spread the word and offer the tape to our friends. I felt after listening to the tape, that I would have been doing a real disservice to any friends suffering from depression by offering them that tape: if you weren't considering suicide before listening to it, you sure would be afterwards.

It dawned on me at the time that the decision making behind the campaign must have taken place in the mormon corridor where that style of 'Appropriate Jazz Fusion' was appreciated. Everywhere else it just seemed weird. I am sure there is a landfill somewhere in Utah with thousands of Bounce Back cassettes mouldering deep within.

The same kind of decision making seems to have happened with the current 'I'm a Mormon' campaign. It didn't occur to anyone outside of the corridor that having everyone write up testimonies (which are later edited at church headquarters) might seem weird everywhere else. Not to mention the fact that most of the testimonies are chock full of LDS verbal shorthand and codewords incomprehensible to the non-LDS.

My mom had the BounceBack! tape. I'd forgotten about that tape.

mine off the top floor of the ZCMI Center. It bounced a little but not really all that impressive.

Condescension in C90 form. Dire.

Obviously, based on the stats that utah has high depression drug usage, the tape didn't solve everyone's problems.