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I'd just like to add, that beyond the above, it seems to be there are plenty of intermediate steps that could be taken. If people are abusing bathroom access based on gender identification to harass women (something that hasn't been proven as far as I can see), add a restriction that says gender must be changed officially before allowing access. You could require concrete steps to be demonstrated (such as hormones) etc. For locker rooms or other areas where nudity is allowed, you could require bottom surgery. There are all types of steps that can be taken to address these concerns that don't target trans people for vigilantism and additional discrimination.

Since I don’t have Alpert’s book, I had Chat summarize his evidence that therapy culture is contributing to levels of anxiety. I am not impressed. So anecdotal and correlation. Smac, if this was an argument showing being LDS increased anxiety based on a Utah therapist’s own clinical experience, someone who specialized in LDS who were distancing themselves from the Church or who had left, also based in part on extensive claims those who had left the Church saying they were happier and less anxious ( of which there are plenty) using the same type of evidence you would be pointing out all the problems with said conclusion. I need to see more empirical data demonstrating his claims before I invest in exploring your hypotheticals.

I agree. Hence the propriety of the pieces statement here: "It's time to consider the possibility that we've become over-therapized, and examine how this practice, intended to heal, may be making us weaker instead of stronger." It would be interesting to see how causation could be quantified in this context. What are your thoughts about the two books referenced in the article? "Bad Therapy" and "Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It's Left Us More Anxious and Divided"? Salient points. Worth considering. Alpert published an article in May: Psychotherapist reveals why therapy might be doing you more harm than good "Systems of oppression" is a political concept. Odd to see it deployed in an individual therapeutic setting. "{T}herapists steer conversations toward race, gender and oppression regardless of why they came in." So the question perhaps is not "Is this happening?", but rather "How prevalent is this sort of thing?" This seems like a good point. "The therapy office should not be a political battleground." That sounds right. Thanks, -Smac

My ward here is a little backward so it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a church policy that we just don’t do. My ward is mostly very old people, and they struggle with technology. We haven’t even been here two years yet and I bet we have a funeral every other month from an older person who has passed away.

I'm not sure there can be a perfect system. Bathrooms are a space where everyone deserves to feel safe and respected. Male presenting people in a woman's bathroom can result in women not feeling safe. That's a problem. Bathroom laws like the one in discussion don't fix it. This was a viral case from a few weeks ago. A man accompanied his daughters into the women's restroom at a truck stop: https://texaslegalgiants.com/dad-confronted-womens-restroom-texas-sb8-law/ . Laws based on biological sex allow this and other exceptions like cleaning or caring for the disabled. Additionally, Laws based on biological sex also require trans-men to use the women's bathroom. So under Kansas's law, some men are allowed in the bathroom. Other men are required to use the women's bathroom. In addition it creates a vigilante system of justice that will likely catch many gender ambiguous people in the mix. So under the Kansas regime, sometimes women will see men in the restroom. On the other hand, states like California protect bathroom access based on professed gender identity. To my knowledge (based on limited research) this has not resulted in any increase in bathroom harassment, but if this isn't the case I'd like to know. This means sometimes a masculine looking trans-woman might be in the women's bathroom. How is this worse than a Masculine looking trans-men in the women's bathroom?

I'm assuming if I search, I'll find the OP broad-painting the demographic that was represented in the most violent attack on an LDS congregation in recent history, that happened less than a year ago? Y'know, for consistency.

Correlation is not causation. It’s not like nothing else anxiety producing in our world has changed so it can only be therapy that is driving up anxiety. How about more people going to therapy because for more the level of anxiety has gone up dramatically? This is like claiming the Church makes people depressed because antidepressants are prescribed at a higher rate in Utah. Why don’t I point to the increase of lawyers as contributing to the increase in anxiety? Or maybe I should point to the increase of household debt, obesity, single person households, internet use (possibly contributing to loneliness) and other factors known already demonstrated as contributing to anxiety. This is not to say that all therapists are good or that everyone is helped by therapy. There are some bad therapists out there and there are clients in long term therapy that aren’t benefitting from said therapy. Diagnosis of anxiety going up also does not mean anxiety itself has gone up (see Utah’s example of antidepressant use). People being more willing to admit they have anxiety could be a contributor.

Could it be by state if there is state level privacy law?

This was 4 different stakes in 2 states so it's more widespread than that, but who knows how far.

hmmm ok yea I do t care if you take it down or not it isn’t anything I’ll lose any sleep over. Was just curious. coming from a stake pres family… those guys pretty much do whatever they want.

If there’s one thing that I admire about you, it’s that you are a master at spinning things in the worst possible light. You never disappoint in your ability to lambast the church for both doing and also not doing something. It’s definitely your superpower.

Yep … of course that is something that can be blamed completely on the members for not reading all the policy manuals. Heaven forbid the church train the bishops in anything except how to count money and to not report child molesters. Those two categories they are expert at.

Ok… I was wondering . Thx

They are still doing a sign-up list on the bishop’s door in my current Ward so it could be a policy that all stakes aren’t enforcing or maybe it was just from that one Stake. It’s really hard to tell sometimes where these directives come from.

I have been called ("diagnosed as"?) a narcissist. I'm not sure what credentials the person who "diagnosed" me has, if any. To the best of my knowledge, I've never even met this person, let alone interacted with him or her in any way beyond a brief on-line exchange. But, I'm sure this person has more than sufficient credentials to enable one to make such a diagnosis, reliably and validly. I'm sure even that brief, not-in-person interaction told this "therapist" everything one needed to know. Q.E.D. [?????]

No one is using circles? I thought the church was really pushing that.

Oh well. Almost 50 years old and no one ever said a thing about it. The church really sucks at embracing their own secret agenda. 😉

They were probably invited but if we didn’t bring them unless we had to because we didn’t have a babysitter.

No, I don't, and I am not seeing it with an easy search, though I am seeing some people talk about it. It's not a priority to find it, so I am happy to retract that, according to board rules, as being a churchwide thing unless someone else does find it. I just know that when it happened when my husband was in, it came down from at least a stake level. The rule was that the list with names couldn't be shown to others. So what I have seen in the wards I have been in was: 1. calling everyone (my husband was specifically asked to do this). 2. Sit in the foyer, announce the exec will be out there, and then people come up to him to make appointments, and he then contacts those who didn't. 3. Email everyone or text. 4. The exec sec just approached people at church and then maybe called others. This year we might have been emailed? I'm not sure, as I have taken my email off the site and only my husband's is there. The bishop and I have talked about my beliefs about the church so only my husband would be approached on that, and I just don't remember how this year.

Looks like I misunderstood something you said. Also, though, I didn’t assume something happened to you personally. Nevertheless, I erased my post.

Do you have an official church source that says signup lists or using signup genius and similar tools are prohibited? Are you saying church policy is for the executive secretary to literally call or corner each ward member in the hallway to set up appointments? If that’s the policy it’s freakin dumb.

Honestly, it has been that way for some time. It has been 20+ years since my husband was exec secretary and he hated the change because he has always hated the phone even in chorded days. But being in 4 different wards and multiple bishops since then, I've noticed they didn't all follow the practice. You can tell, though when someone has been told from higher above them or they read the handbook or they decide it is important because they change and stop having signups.

No idea. Our ward hasn't sent out emails in forever. Everything we do gets posted on our ward website, which has since been taken offline and now merely redirects to our "official" ward website (which every ward now has). Our Elder's quorum has switched all our announcements over to a WhatsApp channel; youth groups are all using GroupMe; and I can't remember what the RS does - maybe they're still on Facebook? Point being, were you in my ward, the only way you would be getting almost anything is if you were participating in Church and got plugged into one of those communication channels, or if you were to actively go seeking information out on the ward website. Times they are a changing...

Just saw this: Perspective: 7 signs your counselor may be undermining your faith Some excerpts: I have been wondering about what seems to be "a proliferation of therapy." From the Amazon blurb for Alpert's book: I've been wondering about this for a while. Jodi Hildebrandt and Barbara Snow, call your office. I've seen many people who have clearly benefitted from therapy. I've also seen people for whom therapy seems to be creating more problems than it solves. Mental health and its varying causes and influences can be hard to pin down and sort out. And it may be tempting for a therapist, when trying to sort out all that complexity, to tell himself that he is being objective and clinical in his assessments and recommendations, and that his therapeutic efforts are detached from his personal opinions about marriage, family, sex, religious, politics, and so on. Lawyers face a daily task of fulfilling our fiduciary duties to clients. These folks come to the lawyer with legal issues to sort out, and he does so for payment, fairly often a lot of payment. That payment stops when the legal problem is fixed, so there can arise a perverse financial incentive for the lawyer to extend or perpetuate those problems. Do therapists encounter similar perverse incentives? And not just financial, but emotional? I wonder if this is particularly important in places like Utah, where no small number of people have distanced themselves from religion, and may be lacking in impartiality when it comes to religious considerations in therapy. I would not want to seek counseling from a therapist who is hostile to my faith, or to faith in general. And perhaps the "pretend{ing} to be neutral" thing should sound a warning bell. I've wondered about this. Concepts like "my authentic self" and "my truth" seem to be unfalsifiable rhetorical cover and justification for the individual doing what he wants, detached from any external moral barometer. This one also carries particularized resonance for me. Having spent many years on this board, I have seen numerous instances of some disaffected/former Latter-day Saints, or else opponents of our faith, work hard to characterizing the Church's emphasis both on faith and and behavior, and self-denial and self-regimentation, to be "oppressive." Fortunately, these are just random and anonymous voices on a message board. I am free to heed or ignore what they have to say. A therapist, on the other hand, is going to be in a position of intentional and particularized influence and access to the individual. As an attorney, I have had effectively no need, or even opportunity, to address the role of religion/faith in a client's life. It's just not in my job to assess those things. Must be hard sometimes for therapists, particularly those hostile to religious faith, to perform such assessments. There is something to this, I think. "Trauma" is in there with "authentic self" and "my truth." Labels susceptible to being used to obscure more than to define or clarify. And then there's "mission creep." "Trauma" gets extended to non-traumatic or not-quite-that-bad sorts of challenges in everyday life. "{D}ifferentiate religious struggle from religious harm." If religious imposes on an individual an expectation to change one's behavior, or to refrain from a behavior, or to maintain a behavior, these can be challenging things to do. They can be a "struggle." But the struggle may nevertheless be appropriate and good. This is most acute when there are implicit or explicit expectations of maladaptive perfectionism in play. See here: What 18 years of research tells us about the mental health of Latter-day Saints A therapist who sees the Church as bad, and its behavioral standards as "oppressive," may have a hard time with this differentiation. I hadn't heard of this one. "Boundaries," like "trauma" and "authentic self" and "my truth," seems to be a concept susceptible to therapeutic misuse. Safeguards are appropriate. Good closing comments. Thoughts? Thanks, -Smac

Y’all are doing it wrong if ur not taking your kids. Jesus wants them to be subjected to the audit too: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook/34-finances-and-audits?lang=eng “34.3.1.2 Tithing Declaration The bishop meets with each member during the last few months of each year to receive his or her tithing declaration. In rare circumstances when the bishop is absent, the stake president may authorize one of the bishop’s counselors to fulfill this responsibility. All members are invited to meet with the bishop to: Declare to the bishop their status as tithe payers. Ensure their contribution records are accurate. Whenever possible, all members of a family, including children, should attend together.”