Can anyone provide a link to the actual study, what was asked, where she found her sample, how she has defined 'mental health' and how it was carried out? I'm drawing a blank on the small amount of time I have available.
Thoughts: There's no mention of young people who have experienced abuse, trauma, bigotry, ignorance and other milder forms of negative experiences within organised religion and have gone their own route in order to try and sort their heads out along with the timeframe involved (well into adulthood) to try and bring about an effective healing of themselves. This will account for a significant slice of her sample size and will go some way to disproving her facile conclusions.
There's also no mention of other factors in their backgrounds that might have contributed, no mention of a representative sample of atheists or agnostics for comparison, and no mention that the conclusion could be seen as the other way around, with mental illness possibly being a contributing factor to people forming non-traditional religious beliefs.
There's also no mention of accounting for the honesty of the people who give the accounts. There is arguably more stigma attached to admitting mental illness amongst Christians, for example, because of the perceived public humiliation of having little faith (it can't be God's fault, after all). A person who has forged their own path might not have these hang ups, may be more used to doubt and self questioning and therefore able to admit their weaknesses. Those belonging to an evangelical faith will be much more likely to see themselves as an advert for that faith and to wish to present themselves as perfect. That's not something as simple as lying to the researcher, it's to do with social and religious pressures and they may even live lives that are so unexamined and with so much of their experience surpressed that they are presently unable to see themselves as mentally ill.
Other people in religious faiths are also more likely to limit the types of experiences they're willing to have because of the moral guidelines set out by their faiths. As a result the assumptions upon which they might build their perspectives may not hold the kind of rigour that is true for people who have invested in experimentation at an early stage. I would therefore probably expect young people who have 'non-traditional' beliefs to be a bit messier earlier in life, but once the tests of life set in and adults experience the deaths of their parents and friends, the failures of their jobs and business ventures, the breakdown of their relationships with their partners and children... well, put it this way: I've always known far fewer happier Christian adults than I have Christian teenagers. And I've known a lot of both.
"This adult life ain't matching up to what my Bible told me. Wish I'd realised earlier innit." - Billy Graham. |
