On Religion and The Just-World Fallcy

A few years ago, a boy in my neighborhood who was about my age took his life. I had only met him one time, he had played basketball with me and a few friends. I don't know if I even spoke to him that day, but when I heard a few months later that he committed suicide, something broke inside of me. I would play the memory of him passing me the basketball over and over again in my mind, realizing that he was just a memory now. His brother came home that week from his deployment in the military to attend the funeral, and the neighborhood had a sort of parade in honor of that. And it fucking bothered me. For some reason the neighborhood seemed to care a hell of a lot more about his brother than about his death. He was gone. Just gone. Forever. Gone.

I currently live in a overwhelmingly Mormon community, and I think the above experience proved to me the toxicity of religion. Consciously or unconsciously, almost every religious person I know subscribes to the just-world fallacy, and as a result, they blame victims. Never was it more evident than when I heard other people my age, all Mormon, making comments like, "well, it's his own fault, he deserved it." It disgusted me. They were so fucking set on this idea that you get what you deserve that they couldn't seem to comprehend the idea that suicide is less of a personal problem and more of a societal problem. Our society is more afraid of the words "mental illness" than it is of the words "nuclear war", and there's something so wrong about that that I can't even begin to express it in one blog post. Sure, the boy pulled the trigger that ended his own life, I don't disagree with that. However, he lived in a community where getting help for depression is nothing less than a shameful experience. Among the Mormon community, depression represents a flaw in character and a lack of spirituality. If an individual is truly righteous, they will be joyful, and therefore, depression symbolizes a sinful life. It's completely distorted thinking, but millions of people think that way.

Society needs to open its fucking eyes and realize that depression is an illness, and that suicide is a symptom of that illness. They have nothing to do with sin, and the sooner that fact is acknowledged the sooner that people can start getting help for their depression or other mental illness without being stigmatized and ostracized. I can't wait for the day when people don't have to be afraid to admit unhappiness.