Mental disorder among nonreligious adolescents

Abstract

This study is the first of its kind to investigate mental disorder among nonreligious adolescents. In this paper, we report three main findings based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey of Adolescents. First, nonreligious adolescents on average have higher rates of mental disorder than adolescents who identify as religious. Second, there is variability in rates of mental disorder among the three types of nonreligious adolescents, with atheists/agnostics experiencing the highest rates, followed by those with no religion, and those with no religious preference. Indeed, after controlling for a host of sociodemographic characteristics, adolescents with no preference have levels of mental disorder that do not differ from the religiously affiliated. Third, the mental health disadvantage of nonreligiosity is strongest among nonreligious adolescents with two highly religious parents. Their rates of mental illness are almost twice that of religious adolescents raised in religious households. Moreover, neither nonreligious nor religious adolescents are negatively affected by being raised in nonreligious households.

Keywords:

• religion
• mental illness
• adolescents

Notes

1 As Hout and Fischer (2002, p. 166) detail, “Most surveys include the word ‘preference’ in the question about religion.” The options given in most surveys, including the GSS, typically only offer “no religion” as a nonreligious option. It is noteworthy that the NCS-A includes these options for nonreligiosity.

2 Household income did not significantly predict adolescent mental illness after accounting for parental education. It was omitted from analyses in the interest of parsimony.

3 Due to the very small sample of adolescents with mothers less religious than their fathers (n = 139), we did not investigate the two variations of heterogamy separately.

4 The sample captured in this table includes all respondents for whom religious affiliation data are available, regardless of whether data are available for their parents as well.

5 We first considered the strength of the adolescents’ religious conviction, but it was not significant, so we omit it from our models here. The available measures of family dynamics were significantly predictive of mental illness, but did not explain the relationship between nonreligion and mental illness.