If you read last Thursday’s post, you know spiritual involvement affects depression in a major way: A review of 444 quantitative research studies, spanning 50 years, found that religious/spiritual involvement lessened the incidence of depression and/or reduced depression severity in over 60% of the studies.
But wait! There’s more!
These review authors didn’t just tally up all the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ results and throw out a flashy number. Nope, they rated the methodological rigor of each study on a scale of one to ten. These ratings emphasized study design, sampling method, number and quality of religious/spiritual measures, quality of mental health outcome measures, inclusion of control variables… you get the drift. Then they looked at the numbers again.
Of the 444 studies, 178 (40%) were rated 7 or higher. Of those (we’ll call them the best studies), 67% found less depression, faster recovery and/or greater responsiveness to religious/spiritual interventions – that’s even better than the first statistic!
If you’re still not impressed (and if you’re still not impressed, this is a really tough crowd!), let’s take a look at religiosity and depression in high risk individuals: