God and Mental Health

"In a paper in the online edition of the Journal of Religion and Health, psychologist Kevin Flannelly of the Spears Research Institute, Healthcare Chaplaincy, and colleagues analyzed the link between particular beliefs about god and psychiatric symptoms in 1,306 adults in the U.S. They used data from a 2004 survey asking people what they thought about god as well as asking about their mental health. For the first part, the survey asked whether the god they believed in was close and loving, approving and forgiving, or creating and judging. Eliminating people who professed no religion (3 percent), Flannelly and his team then compared the incidence of general anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsion disorder, paranoid ideation and social anxiety in the three groups. If your goal is mental health, they found, it’s a whole lot better to believe in a close and loving god. People with that belief had significantly lower rates of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsion and paranoid ideation than people who believed in an approving and forgiving god. Belief in that sort of god reduced incidence of those disorders slightly. Belief in a creating and judging god raised the risk of all those mental disorders, especially of paranoid ideation. Well, sure: if you think an omnipotent and omniscient god is watching your every move and will smite you for any infraction, that can indeed make for a bit of paranoia."