Varieties of Religious Coping: Expanding the Current Models of Depression and Spirituality
Jonathan Morgan, MTS, PhD (c), Research Assistant, Boston University
This paper presents findings from an on-going qualitative study among low-income mothers from marginalized populations at risk for depression. Building on past work in medical anthropology and the psychology of religion we provide new insights into our primary research questions: how is depression differently experienced among this under-represented group? How do these different experiences of depression challenge and enlighten our conceptions of the relationship between religiosity/spirituality and depression?
As a discipline, our normative views of human health implicitly emerge from and are constrained by how we frame the dynamic between spirituality and well-being. Therefore it is essential that we attend to alternative experiences of this dynamic, especially from marginalized and understudied communities. This paper meets this need by presenting the variety of ways that our participants used spirituality and religiosity to deal with stress and depression. We present these thick descriptions of coping in dialogue with two of the most prominent themes in existing research on religion and depression: social support and meaning-making.
Chatters & Taylor's research team (2015) and Koenig's prominent research program (2014) are just two examples of empirical research showing that social support is a strong mediating factor in religiosity's protective effects against depression. But what does this social support look like?
Our interviews suggest social support from religious communities was highly ambiguous. Some of our participants mentioned positive social support, others mentioned negative interactions, but the majority did not connect religious participation to their experiences of stress and depression at all. Nearly every mothers, however, did mention individuals who carried great spiritual importance to them. We explore the ways our participants describe these significant and rare friendships shaping how they view themselves, what they imagine as possible, and whether that possibility includes hope.
That hope brings us to the second theme: meaning making. A variety of researchers, from Park (2005) to Neimeyer (2015), have described religion's capacity to provide meaning as a way of overcoming depression. But, we still lack thick descriptions of this process, especially among marginalized communities. This paper explores how some of our participants used theological reflection to understand needless suffering and to sustain hope amidst that constant grind of stress. But, this cognitive meaning-making process remains perpetually ambiguous because the mothers always return to a life where stress dominates.
In light of this ambiguity, we reflect on the construction of meaning through action. When stress dominates, the solution is not cognitive but simply the action of continuing on. While this does not always have explicitly spiritual tones, it is a deep description of hope and faith.
Each of these themes helps to expand and deepen our understanding of the dynamic between spirituality and coping, thereby also helping us attend to the varieties of the sacred and the ideals of health and well-being which under-represented communities engage.
This paper presents findings from an on-going qualitative study among low-income mothers from marginalized populations at risk for depression. Building on past work in medical anthropology and the psychology of religion we provide new insights into our primary research questions: how is depression differently experienced among this under-represented group? How do these different experiences of depression challenge and enlighten our conceptions of the relationship between religiosity/spirituality and depression?
As a discipline, our normative views of human health implicitly emerge from and are constrained by how we frame the dynamic between spirituality and well-being. Therefore it is essential that we attend to alternative experiences of this dynamic, especially from marginalized and understudied communities. This paper meets this need by presenting the variety of ways that our participants used spirituality and religiosity to deal with stress and depression. We present these thick descriptions of coping in dialogue with two of the most prominent themes in existing research on religion and depression: social support and meaning-making.
Chatters & Taylor's research team (2015) and Koenig's prominent research program (2014) are just two examples of empirical research showing that social support is a strong mediating factor in religiosity's protective effects against depression. But what does this social support look like?
Our interviews suggest social support from religious communities was highly ambiguous. Some of our participants mentioned positive social support, others mentioned negative interactions, but the majority did not connect religious participation to their experiences of stress and depression at all. Nearly every mothers, however, did mention individuals who carried great spiritual importance to them. We explore the ways our participants describe these significant and rare friendships shaping how they view themselves, what they imagine as possible, and whether that possibility includes hope.
That hope brings us to the second theme: meaning making. A variety of researchers, from Park (2005) to Neimeyer (2015), have described religion's capacity to provide meaning as a way of overcoming depression. But, we still lack thick descriptions of this process, especially among marginalized communities. This paper explores how some of our participants used theological reflection to understand needless suffering and to sustain hope amidst that constant grind of stress. But, this cognitive meaning-making process remains perpetually ambiguous because the mothers always return to a life where stress dominates.
In light of this ambiguity, we reflect on the construction of meaning through action. When stress dominates, the solution is not cognitive but simply the action of continuing on. While this does not always have explicitly spiritual tones, it is a deep description of hope and faith.
Each of these themes helps to expand and deepen our understanding of the dynamic between spirituality and coping, thereby also helping us attend to the varieties of the sacred and the ideals of health and well-being which under-represented communities engage.