Spirituality and mental health

ABSTRACT

In many contexts, emotional ailments have been considered problems of religious or spiritual origin. Historically, religious groups were often the primary providers of mental health care. This changed over time with advances in medicine and Freud’s writings framing religion/spirituality (R/S) as a sign of neurosis. In the early- to mid-twentieth century, mental health and R/S were often viewed by Western clinicians and patients as separate and antithetical. Recent decades have been marked by another shift in thought, with increased interest in the overlap between mental health and R/S, and recognition that R/S may in fact serve protective and healing roles in the face of emotional suffering. There has been a concomitant increase in research investigating the connections between R/S and mental health, along with increased development and application of clinical interventions addressing the two in combination. In this narrative review, we summarize the history of how mental health and R/S have been viewed as relating to one another, recent research evidence on the effects of R/S on mental health, and clinical implications of these findings. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing challenges and opportunities in the study and application of how mental health and R/S affect one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• spirituality
• mental health
• spiritual history
• spiritually integrated treatment

Notes on contributors

Larkin Kao is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, USA. She works as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at the VA Boston Healthcare System where she is the site director for medical students and residents from Boston University. Her interests include medical education and the overlap between religion/spirituality and psychiatry.

John Peteet is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he has received several teaching awards and published numerous papers in the areas of psychosocial oncology, addiction, and the clinical interface between spirituality/religion and psychiatry; he has authored or co-edited eight books and is a past President of the American Psychiatric Association’s Caucus on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry.

Christopher Cook is Director of the Centre for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Durham University, UK. He published widely in the field of alcohol misuse and addiction, including articles on spirituality and addiction, before making spirituality, theology and health his main area of clinical and academic interest. Recent book publications include Spirituality and Narrative in Psychiatric Practice (Eds: Cook, Powell and Sims, Royal College of Psychiatrists Press, 2016) and Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine (Routledge 2018). He is a past President of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Christopher C. H. Cook http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7700-7639

Notes

1 The history detailed in the first two paragraphs of this section is drawn primarily from the account provided by Harold Koenig (2005).