In a recent paper in Sociology of Religion, a team led by Christopher G. Ellison, a sociologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, sought to unravel an ongoing mystery in religion research: studies about the relationship between prayer and mental health have yielded very mixed results, some suggesting a positive link, some a negative link, and some no link at all. To examine this in a more careful way, the team decided to approach the subject from a relatively new angle: What sort of relationship with God does the individual person praying have?
The connection between prayer and mental health is a complicated subject, because it's easy to tell multiple stories about how it might work, and it could be that more than one of them is true. For example, while it's easy to imagine that prayer helps reduce stress and anxiety among those who practice it, it's also easy to imagine that particularly troubled people would turn to prayer more often, or that people who are already low in stress and anxiety are serene enough to pray a lot.
Maybe, Ellison and his team said, asking what the relationship between prayer and mental health is isn't a specific enough question. To add more nuance to the subject, they turned to attachment theory, the idea that people, influenced by early experiences with their parents, develop a style of interacting with relationship partners and close friends that fits into one of three different patterns.
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What's fascinating and provocative here is the implication of adaptive versus maladaptive religiosity. Could it be that certain harsher perceptions of God make people particularly prone to mental illness? It certainly makes some intuitive sense — particularly to a nonbeliever like myself — but this is an area in which the findings are pretty new, so there's a lot more research to be done.
Can Harsh Fundamentalism Lead to Mental Illness? -- Science of Us
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