Dec. 9, 1999 (Boston) -- Karl Marx called it "the opium of the people," but
Dec. 9, 1999 (Boston) -- Karl Marx called it "the opium of the people," but if opinion polls are to be believed, a large majority of Americans find religion to be a healing balm that can help them recover from disease, find peace of mind, and live longer, healthier lives.
But does faith live up to its press? Yes, say psychiatrists who study the relationship between religion/spirituality and health. Maybe, but it hasn't been proven yet, say researchers from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
"Even though many elderly people say that religion helps them to cope, is there any objective evidence that it does so? Actually, there is. Better mental health among the religious elderly has been reported by various investigators working with different populations in disparate sites around the U.S., Canada, and Europe," writes Harold G. Koenig, MD, in a recent issue of the journal Annals of Long-Term Care.
Koenig, associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., contends that among disabled elderly people in nursing homes, religious faith "may help ward off depression, speed recovery from depression, and increase quality of life."
To support his argument, Koenig cites studies conducted at his center and elsewhere suggesting that among elderly patients hospitalized with acute and chronic medical conditions, "religious coping" correlated with lower levels of depression. In a separate study, Duke investigators reported that among elderly patients with depressive disorders, religious faith was one of five significant predictors of speed to recovery.
"Elderly people have gone through lots of changes in their lives, and their depression is often related to loss -- they're grieving over loss of youth, loss of functioning, loss of health, loved ones, friends -- one loss after another," Koenig says in an interview with WebMD. "What religion provides those people is support if they're part of a religious community, opportunity for social interactions and for friendships to develop, and the belief system encourages people to look out for one another. ... All of that helps to prevent depression and helps people get through it a little easier."
But as Richard P. Sloan, PhD, and colleagues reported in the journal The Lancet earlier this year, "even in the best studies, the evidence of an association between religion, spirituality, and health is weak and inconsistent." Sloan and colleagues took a systematic look at the methodology of several frequently cited studies of religion and physical health, and found significant flaws in most, noting that the studies failed to control for confounding factors and variables such as behavioral and genetic differences, age, gender, socioeconomic background, and health status. "We believe ... that it is premature to promote faith and religion as adjunctive medical treatments," they write.
Whether studies of religion and mental health are similarly flawed is unclear, but as Lloyd Sederer, MD, medical director of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School tells WebMD, what really counts is how patients respond to episodes of depression.
"There are certain psychosocial conditions that add to the psyche's elasticity, and one of them has to do with the experience of not being alone in the world, the experience of essentially having support of others, including an interior experience of support, which is what faith is all about," Sederer says.
His colleague, Phillip Levenduski, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and vice president for networks at McLean, tells WebMD that understanding a patient's religious convictions gives therapists added insight into that person's thinking and emotional life.
"Cognitive behavior therapy depends very heavily on the assumptions that people make in their lives, how they talk to themselves," Levenduski says. "This self-talk just doesn't pop out of the blue, it comes from somewhere. If you think of some of the most intense learning experiences that people have, you can trace them back to their religious upbringing, and many of the precepts that they live their lives by are often related to the nature of their religious understanding. ... For most folks, their religious experience is substantially greater than what many mental health professionals will be sensitive to or respect."
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