This paper describes a pervasive form of psychological distress occurring among people undergoing a sudden and acute collapse of faith in the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka LDS, or Mormon Church). Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in Utah, I trace the cultural-historical etiology of this unique form of psycho-existential trauma, focusing on ex-Mormons' narratives of 'world collapse'-in which the all-encompassing symbolic-existential framework of reality once provided by religion disintegrated once they lost faith in the Mormon Church. Although marked by symptoms resembling depression, anxiety, dissociation and paranoia, this condition is however unlike mental health disorders described in psychiatric diagnostic manuals, and has thus been largely overlooked within the mental health professions. I thereby discuss the extent to which the distress of religious disenchantment constitutes a unique form of 'cultural syndrome' (Hinton and Lewis-Fernandez in Cult Med Psychiatry 34(2):209-218, 2010), reflective of complex historical, cultural, and religious transformations occurring within contemporary Utah Mormonism.

中文翻译：

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幻灭的自我：关于犹他州前摩门教徒的生存困境和本体论不安全感的人类学笔记。

本文描述了在耶稣基督后期圣徒教会（又名LDS，即摩门教徒）的教义中突然突然崩溃的人们之间普遍存在的心理困扰。借助在犹他州进行的18个月的田野调查，我追溯了这种心理存在创伤的独特形式的文化历史病因学，着眼于前摩门教徒对“世界崩溃”的叙述-在这种叙述中，无所不包的象征性存在框架曾经由宗教提供的现实一旦对摩门教徒失去信心便瓦解。尽管这种症状的特征在于抑郁，焦虑，解离和偏执狂，但这种情况不同于精神病诊断手册中描述的精神疾病，因此在精神卫生专业中已被广泛忽视。