Can Spirituality or Religion Protect Us From Depression?

The question of how religion affects mental health keeps stirring argument. People of faith have long pushed back on psychiatry's tendency to leave spirituality out of treatment, and they tend to have a point. Over the past several years, a handful of well-regarded psychiatry journals have run studies suggesting that religious or spiritual people carry a lower risk of depression. That raises two thorny problems right away. How do you even measure something as slippery as religion or spirituality? And beyond that, do investigations into faith and health belong in serious scientific journals at all?

Despite the messiness, asking whether personal religious belief helps or hurts the mind is a fair scientific question. Faith occupies a large place in many lives, and it can hand people real reserves of resilience. Those who believe often carry a sense that whatever comes, they remain tied to something larger than themselves. They also seem less tormented by the existential puzzle (why am I here, what is my purpose?) that can gnaw at someone without that framework. After trauma, the religious or spiritual appear less likely to sink into feelings of being unloved or worthless. They bounce back. People who hold their faith and spiritual convictions close report being happier and healthier, with more ways to cope, than those for whom belief barely registers.

Spirituality is not a recent add-on to human life. For something like 150,000 years, roughly as long as our species has walked the planet, it has run through our history and our development. The capacity to form religious ideas, or to imagine a bond with others, is part of what sets us apart from other animals. For most of humankind, spirituality is simply how we account for ourselves and the world, and it shapes the picture we carry of who we are. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors practiced it too. The proof shows up in graves thousands of years old, where the dead were buried with special objects meant to accompany them into whatever came next.

So where is the actual evidence? The first long-term look at religiosity and the risk of major depression appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry (the Green Journal) in January 2012, written by researchers at Columbia University. Running over a decade, the study tracked the mental health of 114 adult children whose parents either had or did not have depression. Every participant was Catholic or Protestant, and researchers gauged their religiosity through self-reported answers about how much their spiritual beliefs mattered and how often they attended church.

A connection turned up between religiosity or spirituality and a lower risk of major depression. Participants who described a strong tie to religion or spirituality at the start wound up, by the study's close, facing roughly a quarter of the depression risk that others carried. They also had fewer relapses than the non-religious participants. The researchers then went further, wanting to know whether high-risk adults who rated religion or spirituality as highly important showed thicker brain cortices than those who placed only moderate or low importance on it.

The scans pointed in that direction. People who reported that religion or spirituality mattered most to them had thicker cortex across several regions of the brain. The researchers concluded that faith seems to shield people with a family history of depression from falling ill themselves, and that the cushion may come from this thickening of the cortex. Those who meditate regularly, or keep up some other spiritual practice, show the same cortical thickening in important areas, along with more metabolic activity there, compared with people who call themselves non-spiritual. Meditation's everyday payoffs are already familiar: staying present, focus, steadier breathing, lower blood pressure, less stress, a longer attention span, better organization, stronger relationships, a firmer grip on the demands of work and family. The list runs long. Findings like these could open up new explanations for why such practices guard against depression, especially among people genetically prone to it.

One detail stands out. Showing up at church every week turned out not to be the deciding factor. What protected high-risk people most was a deep personal sense that spirituality or religion mattered. More work is needed, but the pattern hints that faith may fend off major depression by thickening the cortex and pushing back against the cortical thinning that major depression usually brings. Scientific support for the idea that religion can do something good for mental health carries real weight. The hope is that it nudges clinicians to pay closer attention to the spiritual resources their patients already draw on.