Study Finds Going to Church Regularly Lessens Depression

A new study conducted by a group of social scientists and published in The Journal of Religion & Faith, shows that attending church may help to avoid depression or to lesson symptoms. The team, led by Eliezer Schnall from the Yeshiva University in Manhattan, surveyed a diverse group of 92,539 women over the age of 50 and found that there seems to be a provable connection between attending church regularly and lessened symptoms of chronic depression.

The team was following up on research published in 2008 that showed that women who went to church regularly, tended to live longer. The thinking then was that regular church service attendance provided some means of improving health conditions in the women studied, and it was postulated at the time that it might be due to lessened depression which many studies have shown, reduces life longevity.

To find out, the team sent out surveys to women regardless of religious affiliation or any other background criteria. Of those responding, the team found that 56 percent of those that went to church regularly reported being more optimistic than the general population as a whole. At the same time, the data also revealed that 27 percent of those responding who went to church regularly reported feeling less depressed than did those who did not attend church.

The survey also showed that there is a huge diversity in church going habits among those surveyed, which is assumed to reflect society as a whole. Thirty four percent said they had not attended church in the past month. Of those that did attend in that period, twenty one percent said they went less than once a week. Thirty percent said they did attend weekly and fourteen percent said they went even more often than that.

The authors are careful to point out that their study only applies to older women and thus their results cannot be applied to other age groups or to men. On the other hand, it does seem likely that future research will bear this out. Also, it's not clear if the results are so clear cut for women in general because many older women who attend church regularly are single, which means that going to church may be filling a void in their life or serving some other purpose. They also note that many older women tend to gain more of a socializing effect from church attendance than other groups and thus it might be that side benefit they receive from having friends in the church is what is actually causing the lower rates of depression.