Title: The Mental Health of Jehovah's Witnesses
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Content: These will be briefly reviewed by year, the oldest first. The Rylander Study
Swedish psychiatrist Dr. Rylander investigated a sample of conscientious objectors imprisoned in Sweden. Of the 135 randomly selected cases, fully 126 were Witnesses. Of these 126, Rylander diagnosed 51 as neurotic, 42 psychotic, 32 as mentally retarded, and 5 as brain-damaged (some overlap exists because some cases were in two or more categories). [ 7] Diagnosis was made solely on the basis of behavior that was clearly pathological, such as irrational paranoia or severe long term depression, and not behavior that resulted from following Watchtower doctrine as non-social involvement with the non-Witnesses. Rylander also concluded from the subjects' medical records and his interviews that their pathological state was not uncommonly evident before conversion, but that the Watchtower's' influence was often detrimental to mental health, sometimes severely so. About four percent of the eligible armed service Swedish population were judged psychologically "unfit" for military services. The corresponding figure for Witnesses was twenty-one percent, or a rate five times greater. This was very close to the same ratio found by Spencer [8] whose diagnosis of "psychotic" or "neurotic" was made on the basis of mental hospital admission screening. Few of the cases in Rylander's study were marginal Witnesses, and most were actively involved in the Watchtower.