Religiosity and Psychological Resilience in Psychiatric Patients: An Overview

Religious and spiritual (R/S) dimensions of mental health have been poorly studied in psychiatry in the last 150 years. In the late 19th century, Jean Charcot and Sigmund Freud began to associate religion with hysteria and neurosis, and therby interpreting this social phenomenon als psychopathology. This began a deep divide that would separate religion from mental health care for the next century [1]. It was Larson and colleagues in 1986, who conducted the first systematic review of quantitative research on R/S in psychiatry, focusing on religious variables found in four psychiatric journals between 1978 and 1982. They reported that only 2.5% of psychiatric articles reviewed included a religious variable. The religious variable examined was often a single static measure of religious affiliation rather than multiple dynamic measures of religious involvement [2]. Six years later, the same group assessed all measures of religious commitment reported in research studies published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and Archives of General Psychiatry in 1978 through 1989, finding 139 R/S measures examined in 35 studies. For the majority of measures assessed, the studies reported a positive relationship between religious involvement and mental health, finding in 72% a positive correlation, in 16% a negative correlation, and in 12% no correlation [3]. For many years, the work of Larson and colleagues served as a state-of-the-art review of associations between religion and mental health. Since then, however, research on the topic has increased dramatically across health disciplines, but has not been analyzed in a systematic way, at least not within psychiatry and neurology. Due to the large number of reports available, reviews on the topic are often biased by the author’s selection of papers. Our aim was to conduct a systematic evidencebased review (EBR) of research on R/S and mental disorders between 1990 and 2010, using simple but rigorous selection criteriarating the quality of each study’s design and methods, and summarizing the findings.