What it costs people
Mission Service
Two years, at nineteen, funded by your own family, with your doubts labeled as the adversary.
The point in one sentence
Missions are presented as the best two years, and for many people they are formative and good, but the structure has features that would be alarming in any other setting.
I served one. This is not written from the outside.
What the Church itself acknowledges
This is the strongest evidence here, because it is the Church admitting the problem in its own leader guidance:
"Encourage the missionary, her or his family, and ward members to refer to her or him as a 'returned missionary' and not an 'early-returned' or 'early-released missionary.' This wording choice can help reduce the stigma associated with early releases."
Official counseling resource. The same page instructs leaders not to pressure a missionary to return to the field until fully recovered.
An institution does not write guidance about managing stigma unless the stigma is real and it knows it.
What returning early actually costs
A study published in BYU’s own Religious Educator surveyed early-returned missionaries:
- 73 percent reported feelings of failure about their missions.
- 58 percent felt their ward members received them poorly or with indifference.
- About a third experienced a period of inactivity afterward, and half of those never came back.
This is survey-based with self-selected respondents, published in a Church-university journal. It is credible documentation that the phenomenon is real. It is not a rigorous representative statistic.
And I could not find any independent peer-reviewed study establishing missionary suicide rates or an early-return percentage with a proper denominator. Do not quote one. If you state a number like that, someone will ask for the source and there is not a good one.
The structure, described plainly
- You leave at eighteen or nineteen, often having never lived away from home.
- Your family pays for it. You are the product and the customer at once.
- Contact with your parents was limited to weekly email and two phone calls a year for most of the modern era.
- You are never alone. A companion is with you at all times, including assignments that function as monitoring.
- Your schedule is set from waking to sleeping.
- You are measured on baptisms, with numbers reported up a chain.
- Doubts that surface are commonly attributed to the adversary rather than examined.
Any one of these is defensible on its own. Describe the whole set to someone who has never encountered it and watch their face.
Concede this, and mean it
Many people genuinely loved their missions. They learned a language, grew up fast, formed real friendships, and helped people. That is not fake and saying it is will lose you every returned missionary you talk to.
The argument is not that missions are worthless. It is that a program with this much control over teenagers, funded by their own families, with an explicit success metric and an official policy for managing the shame of leaving early, deserves examination that it almost never gets.
Why this should make you question
The thing worth sitting with is the doubt handling. If a nineteen year old on a mission starts to wonder whether it is true, the answer he is given is that the question itself comes from Satan. He is nine thousand miles from home, financially dependent, permanently accompanied, and told that the thought in his head is the enemy.
Whatever else that is, it is not a setting designed for finding out whether something is true.