The Bible, the Brain, and the Blues

Do people who hold religious beliefs get depressed less often? Could sitting in meditation actually change something in the brain? A growing number of researchers think the answer leans toward yes, and they are putting real hours into mapping the territory where faith and mental health overlap. Belief in something larger than ourselves is nothing new. It stretches back as far as we can trace human culture, from the temple rituals of ancient Egypt to the churches that dot the American South. Some people treat spiritual practice and physical health as two sides of one coin, pointing to the healing services held in houses of worship the world over. Healers working within a spiritual framework have existed across wildly different societies for hundreds of years. And on the Eastern side of the tradition, teachers have long claimed that meditation, by quieting the mind and bringing a person back to center, can push back against depression and lift a person's general sense of well-being. More psychologists are starting to agree.

The argument that spirituality lowers your odds of depression holds a certain logic. People who practice a religion, or who simply describe themselves as spiritual, often come with a built-in community around them. A church member, for instance, can usually find counseling through clergy or pastoral care without having to look far. Plenty of believers say their faith hands them a sense of purpose and a kind of calm, and both of those tend to lift mood. The number of people who credit religion with changing their lives for the better is hard to ignore. Almost everyone has heard someone describe the moment they found the right congregation, or turned toward Christ, and watched their life reorganize itself around that. The anecdotes pile up, and they mostly point the same direction.

Psychiatrist Emily Deans, M.D., writing in Psychology Today, put it this way: she has watched people without a spiritual anchor struggle harder after trauma, wrestling with the sense that they are unloved or unworthy, while those who feel connected to something greater seem to carry a kind of backup that steadies them no matter what lands on them. Deans adds that the religious and the spiritual appear less tormented by the questions that gnaw at everyone else: why am I here, what is any of this for.

The flip side is real too. For some people, religious life breeds guilt rather than relief. Scandals and betrayals among church leaders can leave followers frightened and full of doubt. Still, the cases where faith seems to do more good than harm appear to outnumber the others, or at least the people reporting the benefits tend to speak up more loudly.

Not everyone in psychology buys any of this. There are researchers who argue that religion has no business inside a laboratory and who resent seeing grant money spent chasing the question at all. But others say the data is starting to accumulate. Deans points to two papers that ran in the Green Journal. In 2012, a Columbia University team followed 114 people who carried a family history of depression. Participants who called themselves religious turned out to be roughly a quarter as likely to be diagnosed with a serious depressive disorder as those who did not. Even among the religious subjects who had already been through depression before, repeat episodes showed up less frequently than they did in the non-religious group. One detail stood out: whether or not these people actually attended services made no measurable difference. Simply identifying as religious or spiritual was enough to register the effect.

The following year, 2013, the same researchers scanned the brains of religious and non-religious subjects with an MRI and measured the cortex. People who described themselves as spiritual, or who meditated on a regular basis, showed a thicker cortex than those who did not. Earlier work had already hinted that a thicker cortex may guard against depression, while a thinner one leaves a person more exposed to it. That region of the brain is tied to resilience, the capacity to absorb a blow and keep standing.

Critics counter that the Green Journal findings rest on too few participants to prove much of anything, and they have a point about the sample size. Yet the results push a familiar question back onto the table: is the link between mind and body deeper than we assumed? It also carries a chicken-and-egg problem. Do spiritual practice and meditation thicken the cortex over time, or are people born with thicker cortexes simply more inclined to gravitate toward those practices in the first place? Nobody can say yet. More research will have to settle it, and given how many investigators are now circling the subject, those studies are probably not far off.