Well, praydude, the OP said "suicide and depression statistics", which you changed to "mission suicide and depression statistics."
I was thinking that the reference included, or perhaps primarily meant, the conflicted time prior to leaving, and the unhappy time of being maltreated after early returning. Neither of which would be included in what you said.
That is true. I suppose it would be a difficult thing to track. I am so angry with the morg for this whole 18 year old mission thing. It seems like it will hamstring a whole generation of mormon males for their own selfish reasons. Not that they care. I look back on my mission and I hate that i gave up so much of my life for a stupid cult. I remember them telling me i would look back on my mission and see that it was the best years of my life and now I look at my time on my mission as the prelude to the worst years. My mission set me up to marry a psycho mormon woman and live through that hell. What in the world did I really know about life back then? I can see that I'm ranting so I should stop.
While coming home from Brazil, my MTC district and I encountered a senior missionary couple and a young missionary in the Sao Paulo airport, they were not form our mission.
The young missionary was not wearing a tie or a name tag and had is left wrist heavily bandaged. Apparently the young man had 'fallen' through a large window, badly lacerating his arm in the process, requiring American healthcare. The senior missionaries were 'accompanying' him to ensure that he arrived safely in is injured condition.
Being so exhausted and delirious with the process of coming home, I and most of the other missionaries traveling with me, didn't bat an eye and swallowed the story wholesale. It wasn't until a week or two later that I realized, that young man had attempted to take his own life, most likely out of shame or guilt for some transgression committed either while in Brazil, or premission. The lack of nametag suggests to me he had be released in the field, usually the sign of serious transgression. The senior missionary couple were in fact escorting him on a kind of geriatric suicide watch.
Everytime I think of this I am filled with horror, horror that this young man felt so terrible about some unknown transgression that he had attempted to end his life, a life no doubt as filled with potential and promise as my own. I am also shocked that the only security he had against another attempt at taking his own life was a pair of septagenarians who more than likely had no training in such manners.
I can only imagine that this scene may be more and more common with the lowering of the missionary age.
I had unconfessed premission masturbation. When I finally fessed up, I had a whole back up plan, if they sent me home, I'd join the border patrol, and if my family wanted nothing to do with me, at least I'd have a noble purpose and be able to support myself, since I'd obviously not be worthy to go to a church school. Well, the prez didn't do anything of the sort aside from make me make a humiliating call to my stake prez back home. What I'm trying to say is that at this time, I was almost 20, a little more seasoned and mature, suicide did not enter my mind once. As an idealistic 18 year old, I may have taken the bits and pieces of blood atonement I had read about in old institute manuals to heart and attempted to cleanse my soul that way.
lapsed Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I think we will see a lot more missionaries coming > home early especially, from the MTC. Too much too > soon.
I couldn't agree more. You do a lot of growing up from high school graduation to you 19th birthday. I spent the summer after high school on a Japanese fishing boat earning money for college. You see the real world.
Also with the internet and a more free flow of information, I think more and more people are just bagging the mission. I think the church is lower the age to snag the high school kids when they are still naive before that year out of high school wises them up some.
The church sweet talks you on the mission. They slam the door on you at the MtC, hopefully peer pressure and brainwashing gets you on that plane, and then they take your passport so you can't run away.
TBM and exmo returned missionaries often admit they would have left the mission eary if they had the money, passport, or didn't fear what the people back home would think of them.