#and this is definitely my own personal like — idk. scar tissue (metaphorically?)

[keshetchai]

I'm willing to reread in a few days, but we may also disagree here. I have always firmly believed one of the most unhealthy parts of religions in general is the urge to talk about religion in lieu of actually addressing mental health. I think it's dangerous, cruel, and manipulative to act like religion will cure mental health issues. It's a situation where someone is intensely vulnerable and at worst, people prey on that — at best they just introduce their religious ideas at the expense of actually talking about mental health help. Not to mention, this kind of thing is something predatory evangelizing groups specifically look out for and seek in people.

Few religion-related things make me more viscerally upset/angry than people acting like talking to the right religious expert/sage/whoever or believing the right thing or accepting the right premises or simply thinking something else would magically help, cure, or alleviate my mental health problems, and I am certainly not okay with having that happen to other people either.

I'll grant it's very possible I'm speaking from a place of my own religious based traumas/anxiety, and the ways in which people I know have been traumatized by various religions and how these experiences have impacted me/them. I don't have OCD, but I do have anxiety, and I have in the past had anxiety spirals about some of those same concerns (how do we know which religion is right/true/what if I'm doing something wrong and that's bad for me forever???). When I was able to get help for anxiety and when this stopped featuring in my own anxiety nearly as much, I realized I felt immensely frustrated and furious by the people who pushed religion at me as a cure. I also felt betrayal in the fact that religious people reinforced each other in this kind of approach, but never actually turned to each other and said "hey maybe wrong time/wrong place?"

People who were trying to be kind — who sometimes even loved me — made things feel worse because their answers made my inability to suddenly be "better" or "believe more/think correctly to feel at peace" seem like a massive failure. As a teenager, I watched friends and classmates deal with similar fears/anxieties/various mental health concerns, intermingled with religious questioning/anxiety and I began to realize that a lot of the time adults used this as leverage for a "sales pitch opportunity." Or that they told us things that didn't help the mental health problem and when it wasn't magically fixed, we felt worse.

The people I know irl with OCD and scrupulosity tendencies also didn't find help with managing/addressing it by talking to more clergy or being told more theology.

I think part of this is valuing different things as kindness. I feel it is unkind to answer about religion and theology when those things are causing them distress, and I think it's unkind to not step in and remind people we can't just good-thoughts cure mental health issues. I feel like it's kind to step in and point out that other religious people may have ulterior motives in answering these kinds of questions, and I think it's kind to tell other people who don't want to come off like that to reconsider. I also think it's a vital kindness to admit that religion isn't a miracle cure for mental health.

I personally usually felt minimized by religious people the most when they acted like I could simply think myself better by thinking whatever it was that they thought. Idk I just...is deeply upsetting to me when I know I and many other people who got religious answers to mental health questions out of a place of kindness and it ultimately hurt us because instead of people going "none of us is qualified for this, you should speak to a mental health professional," we got religious paternalism and well meaning nice answers.

I get that you feel you were kind and compassionate. I just... I don't think of this as "doing the best good thing," or a nice thing, so much as I think of this as "the thing here is to be honest and to set aside a knee-jerk desire to have a fun chat about theology and instead admit that a mental health issue needs a mental health professional. The alternative may seem nicer, but ime it wasn't actually kind."

As someone who enjoys religion blogging/discussions, I've come to realize that it's a good practice to be aware of the general signs/symptoms of religious-OCD thinking (aka scrupulosity), because if the conversation is taking on all the hallmarks of scrupulosity, it's actually a definitive sign that we cannot meaningfully and compassionately engage in a conversation about religion in a healthy way. I've actually had this play out a significant number of times online, and when I realized what it was, I also began to realize that the intrusive thoughts/obsessive and compulsive thinking are only ever fed by continuing the discussion with that person.

Imo, the responsible thing to do is to recognize that (even if the other person hasn't outright stated it/isn't diagnosed)* the conversation is not about religion, it is about needing mental health support from professionals and experts. Talking to me, the layperson who enjoys chatting theology and my religion — is not only not helping, but seems to actively harm them. I'm not just talking about the person who I replied to today, either. Like I've said, I've seen this happen dozens of times in various online forums.

*[while I am against diagnosing strangers on the internet, it's important to realize A) lots of people don't know what Scrupulosity is, so it's possible they've never considered this is a mental health concern that could be treated, and that B) for the purposes of my concern, it doesn't matter if they actually have diagnosed OCD. The only thing that matters is that their thought-process causes them genuine distress/fear, and every response given to them seems to only incite new/additional distressing questions/thoughts, or further entrenches the original distress.]

Ultimately, any discussion aside from "you might want to speak to a mental health professional about scrupulosity OCD" seemingly puts me in the position of feeling as if I am being used for their self-harm. I hate that feeling. I do not want to be leverage for fear and pain. I have GAD, I despise the idea that I am making things worse.

No matter how much I love religious discussion, the answer in these cases is always "please reach out to an OCD specialist/mental health professional. I am not qualified to discuss this." And then to stop there. I have never once seen anyone stuck in this compulsive thought spiral be reassured or feel any better by hearing from someone else's approach to theology handled with things like empathy, compassion, logic, or even atheism. It doesn't matter what we say, how we say it, or how we relate to our own religion. The urge to engage in this kind of conversation in order to chat about religion is a sign that we are not equipped to help.

You can't have a conversation here, because intentionally or not, ten times out of ten, you are adding fuel to the fire. Just like people can't simply tell me something that would erase/talk me out of my ADHD/depression/anxiety disorder, you also cannot simply argue/reassure/persuade people out of scrupulosity. We should not try. We have a responsibility to consider that it's outright harmful to do so, and to disengage.