Over and over again on my mission we taught people who later turned out to be mentally ill or mentally challenged. They were generally normal enough in the beginning, but then it became more and more obvious. If it wasn't all that obvious, we baptised them anyway. Then later something would generally happen. We kept meeting with a guy at church when we taught him, but finally went to visit him at his given address, and it was a mental institution where he turned out to have a permanent apartment. (The highlight was that we got into a train wreck going out to the mental institution. Our train ran into the back of another train and derailed us both. So yes, cludgie has indeed been through a train wreck, should anyone ever ask you.)

When I made it back to my mission area some 30 years later and lived there for a while, we had no more members attending the branch (since cobbled into a ward) than we had when I was there, but a few hundred on the name list. The EQ president and I went through the list in order to assign home teachers, and he would say, "This guy's mentally ill. That man right there is nuts. This lady's crazy. These two are in institutions. This man lives in the Metro, so we'll go down and see him if we can find him. This woman is in a special needs home. This woman has tried to commit suicide on multiple occasions..." It just went on and on. We had literally dozens of people who should never have been baptised.

I remember how desperate we were to convert, and these people were probably easy pickings. When I was still attending that branch in 2001, we had two people with schizophrenia. One was a young woman who was heavily medicated and could not carry on a conversation very well. She would sometimes light up cigarettes right during sacrament meeting and we'd have to get on her case and take her outside. The other guy was partially functional, but was uber-religious and would make special "signs" to himself with his hands all during the meeting--a crooked finger over his shoulder, a "C" over the center of his chest, and other similar things. He always wanted to kiss the sacrament cloth, but we wouldn't let him. So after the meetings he would gradually sneak up on the sacrament table little by little and suddenly grab a corner of the cloth and kiss it. A couple of years after I left they told me that he had become dangerous to himself and others and had to go to an institution.

Mentally ill people are often easy to talk to and are fascinated by religion. Does it appear that Mormons may have a disproportionate amount of mentally ill members on their records due to this phenomenon, more than anyone's national average?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/04/2012 09:34AM by cludgie.

That was my observation as a missionary in northern Italy a decade ago as well. I taught and fellowshipped institutionally crazy people on a seemingly regular basis, though never baptized any. Since I would go months on end without teaching a single discussion (even tracting 60 hours per week), I was willing to take anything I could get, and figured God wouldn't discriminate. They were just... easier, even though I'd feel like I was going insane sometimes being around them. They usually caused quite a bit of trouble in church - and one severely mentally ill lady had actually tried to murder the bishop in the middle of fast and testimony meeting, right there in front of everybody. Three AP's had been involved in getting her baptized, and she followed one back home to the US, to his dismay. Ironically, the most sane baptisms came from the most rebellious missionaries.

It might just be an Italian thing.

Yes, they are more commonly referred to as 'apologists'...