Taken as a group, people who choose to lead spiritual or religious lifestyles tend to experience better mental health. Understanding why that is can help us all emerge from the “COVID-19 slump.”
Mental health was a serious problem in the U.S. well before COVID-19, but with almost half the population reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression as of December 2020, the pandemic made the crisis impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, research from the first few months of the pandemic emerged suggesting that on average religious and spiritual people were coping significantly better than the overall U.S. population, despite often being among those likelier to be affected by COVID-19.
This project investigates what lies behind these findings and asks what we can all learn from the relationship between spirituality and health, regardless of our faith status.
