13 thoughts on “Blaming Mental Illness on Sin”

    1. I wish. That man ruined my life. Most of my church worshipped the guy. I think my parents quoted him more than the Bible.

  3. In my area, it’s par for the course to find fundies who like him. Crazyland (Gothard, Ruckman, etc.) is indeed closer than would be comfortable for many fundies.

  5. I grew up thinking Gothard was our modern day Moses, and that he would lead us to “a promised land” of sorts… now I feel sick at the mention of his name.

  6. What about the tens of thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health workers that believe the exact opposite? Why pick out one quack and make him the authority? Blaming schizophrenics for being irresponsible? It is this kind of ignorance that as a former fundamentalist and psychologist in training makes me, pardon the pun, go crazy! Ironically, while claiming to be taking a biblical position, he is actually advocating behaviorism, a theory based entirely on the “dreaded” theory of evolution. My goodness, I can see the slippery slope of apostasy being greased as he speaks.

  7. Years ago, many people with autism were mistakenly diagnosed as being schizophrenic. If those mistakenly diagnosed people were placed on a program of intense behavior modification, given clear, simple goals and rewarded when they reached them, they might appear to have made some improvement. Of course it would have nothing to do with sin, just appropriate therapy. It’s odd that Gothard never mentions the name of this doctor.

  9. OH. MY. GOSH.

    I used to be in ATI and remember learning about this in the seminars and those awful Wisdom Booklets.

    I have a lot of wounds I’m dealing with now due to this childless bachelor telling families how to live their lives and beat down–er, RAISE their children.

  10. I’ve had to deal with clinical depression most of my life, and it’s a good thing that I didn’t see this when I was at my worst…I might have actually believed the guy, because one of the facets of my illness was that I felt responsible for EVERYTHING. I blamed myself for everything that went wrong, whether I caused it or not.

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