Journal: Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 12, 2021
Author: Lloyd Christopher, Reid Graham, Kotera Yasuhiro

“Seeking professional help for psychological distress is generally associated with improved outcomes and lower levels of distress. A key factor in alleviating the undesirable outcomes associated with mental illness is early therapeutic intervention (Cook et al., 2017).

In light of their fundamentalist theology, Evangelicals often conceptualise mental health as vertically representative of their spiritual life, which is not contingent on biopsychosocial mechanisms (Hartog and Gow, 2005).

Such a reductive understanding of mental illness has pitted secular and spiritual care against each other for many believers (Wesselmann et al., 2015). Indeed, the very act of soliciting professional help rather than trusting in God’s provision may be interpreted as a sign of spiritual weakness or failure (Mayers et al., 2007).

Lloyd (2021, p. 2719) referred to this negative aspect of religion as “reductive spiritualisation”: a process through which mental health problems may be connected solely with spiritual aspects (demons, sin, or generational curses), with relative neglect towards life context and experience.

As such, the Evangelical fundamentalist worldview in which mental illness is seen as the result of sinful living may be particularly detrimental as it encourages believers to seek a spiritual solution and be dismissive of secular interventions.

Whilst official guidelines from mainstream churches in the United Kingdom recognise contemporary biopsychosocial models of mental illness (e.g., Church of England, 2012), other Christian communities ascribe to the hyper spiritualisation of psychological illness (Mercer, 2013), sometimes vilifying the mental health professions (Vitz, 1994).

As a result, religious fundamentalism may encourage persons with mental health concerns to preferentially solicit help from their religious leaders (VanderWaal et al., 2012)

With evidence of religious leaders not collaborating with mental health professionals when assisting their parishioners (Stansbury et al., 2012), Christians with lived experience of mental illness can find themselves being ignored or disregarded (Lloyd and Waller, 2020).

Within the context of religion, research has also shown that men are more likely to hold stigmatising beliefs about mental illness (Wesselmann and Graziano, 2010).

It has been postulated that this gender difference may be explained, by help-seeking’s acting as a violation of gender norms in which men may feel emasculated if they cannot independently regulate their well-being (Addis and Mahalik, 2003).