Mormonism and Mental Health

The following is based on an opening statement for a recent debate I participated in:

To begin, I would like to summarize the state of the scientific literature concerning the relationship between Mormonism and mental health. Quite often in debates like this, you’ll get both parties cherry picking studies that agree with them and then the debate turns into quibbles over methodology or whose studies are more biased. While these are important conversations to be had, for the sake of time I want to bypass this problem by giving you an overview of all the studies that have been published on this subject over the last several decades. When researchers want to know what the state of the literature is on a given subject, they conduct a literature review where they search for all the studies that have been published on a subject within a certain time period and then they summarize their findings. To date, there have been 3 such reviews that have been published on this subject. In 1996, Dr. Daniel Judd reviewed 55 studies that were published between 1960 and 1995. A dissertation by Jared Overton reviewed 37 studies published from 1995 to 2005. In 2017, Rocío Cordero and Bárbara Romero reviewed 19 studies published between 2005 and 2016. Lastly, I was able to contact Dr. Justin Dyer, Daniel Judd, Megan Gale, and Hunter Finlinson, all researchers at BYU, who provided me with 47 additional studies that were published between 2005 and 2022. In total, these reviews cover 158 studies that have been published between 1960 and 2022 in peer reviewed journals. In the aggregate these studies have hundreds of thousands of participants who came from a diverse set of backgrounds. For example, there were studies that included female, LGBTQ, Hispanic, and Polynesian samples.  

My opponent may accuse me of bias because many of the authors of these studies are affiliated with BYU, but he should know that authors of these studies range from being LDS, non-LDS, and there are even a few studies authored by those who are antagonistic to the church. In fact, several of the studies included in my review were co-authored by Dr. John Dehlin. It’s important to note that even the studies that were authored by LDS researchers were peer reviewed in respected scientific journals and many of the reviewers were not LDS. What I am doing here is reviewing all of the evidence without regard to its source.

For the sake of brevity, I will only go over the general themes that were covered in these reviews and the conclusions they reached. Mental health variables included in this review were anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, marital satisfaction, divorce rates and family life, premarital sexual patterns, self-esteem, irrational beliefs, self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. They also included variables like delinquency, rates of drug and alcohol abuse, social competence, life expectancy, overall physical health, and risk of certain health conditions like cancer, asthma, or heart problems. 

To summarize the findings of these studies, I will quote the conclusions that the authors themselves reached from their reading of the data. In Dr. Judd’s 1996 review he concluded that:

1.There is little support for the assertion that [LDS] religiosity is antithetical to mental health.

2. The data indicated that [LDS] individuals who live their lives consistent

with their religious beliefs experience greater general well-being, marital

and family stability, and less delinquency, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse” 

In Jared Overton’s 2005 review, he concludes “While limitations, exceptions, and lack of uniform conceptualizations exist in this literature, in general, the studies reviewed describe a fairly healthy, happy, religious, and growing LDS population.” 

In Cordero and Romero’s 2017 review, they conclude “Results show that following the restrictive Mormon doctrine generates beneficial effects for the health [of LDS members]. Habits related to toxics and food, as well as social support, from family and Mormon community are an important basis for good health.”

 Lastly, Dr. Justin Dyer summarized his reading of the 47 studies conducted between 2005 and 2022 as follows: “The majority show that Latter-day Saints do better on almost any domain. The more spiritual they are, the better off they are” However he also admits that “with LGBTQ individuals, the picture is more mixed.” Now when he says the studies on LGBTQ Latter-day Saints are mixed, he’s mainly referring to the number of studies that came to a certain conclusion. He’s not referring to the quality of the studies. This is important because studies that concluded that the LDS church is harmful to LGBTQ Latter-day Saints used convenience samples with no comparison group. When we only look at the studies that are based on large representative samples that include a comparison group, we find evidence that the church promotes better mental health and lower suicidal ideation even among LGBTQ Latter-day saints. 

Now again, if my opponent wants to question the objectivity of these reviews because they are affiliated with BYU in some way, I have just shown that the researchers conducting these reviews are willing to admit when results are mixed or unclear.  It just so happens that in the vast majority of the categories included in these reviews, the results aren’t mixed or unclear.

It’s also important to note with these reviews that there were some studies that reported neutral results, and an even smaller percentage reported negative results. However, when conducting reviews on any subject there will always be outlier studies that diverge from the general pattern, and in regard to the subject we are debating, the vast majority of studies reported overwhelmingly positive results. 

Lastly, when these studies compared Mormons with Catholics and Protestants, they often outperformed them in many different categories, which speaks volumes because Catholics and Protestants often outperformed the general population in these same categories. Another notable finding was that the more invested a person was in their LDS faith, the better the results were. So, members who married in the temple, read their scriptures and went to church regularly, and served a mission had better life outcomes than those that didn’t. These results held for the female, Hispanic, and Polynesian samples that were studied as well. 

Now that we’ve looked at what strong evidence looks like, I would like to show what weak evidence looks like regarding this issue. One example of weak evidence is when critics try to use Utah as a proxy for Mormonism. They’ll often point out that Utah has high suicide rates, anti-depressant use, sexual assault rates, etc, etc. It’s ironic when our Christian critics use these arguments against us because atheist critics will often use this  very argument against them. Atheists will often rightly point out that the Bible belt has extremely high violent crime rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates and then attribute these problems to the high levels of Christianity within the Deep South. This is a bad argument largely because when researchers study large populations within the Bible belt, they find that these social problems are mainly found among people who identify as Christians, but they aren’t active participants in any church and their religion doesn’t play a significant role in their individual lives. When researchers look at people in the Deep south who are active participants in a church and score high in religious salience, they find that these social problems are not nearly as prevalent among these people and that they score much higher on numerous indicators of well being than the general population. Research shows similar patterns in Utah.

Critics should also remember that no more than 40% of the Utah population are active in The Church. When we see problems like high suicidality in Utah, we have to accept the possibility that the people responsible for these trends may not be very active in the church, or they may not even be members at all. We can support this hypothesis by showing that when you break these problems down by county we don’t find them to be more prevalent in counties with higher LDS populations. In fact, it’s the opposite. Salt Lake County and Carbon Country are the most secular counties in Utah, yet many of the social problems that get attributed to Utah are much more prevalent in these counties than the LDS dominated Utah County. What this shows is that using Utah as a proxy for Mormonism, by itself, is a rather useless, and frankly juvenile, argument used by critics who are too lazy to put in the work to back up their assertions. It’s also spit in the face of all the researchers who have put in the work to collect and analyze data and then get their work published after the long and arduous process of peer review. 

Another argument critics will use to criticize the church is to use personal anecdotes of someone who experienced severe trauma in relation to their interaction with the church and its members. While I do not wish to downplay anyone who has been truly hurt by anything that the church and its members have done or said, we have to prioritize data over anecdotes when it comes to assessing the church’s overall effect on its members and on society. 

By way of analogy, I’ve met people who claim to have had very severe negative reactions to vaccines that have affected them for the rest of their lives. These same people will sometimes claim (based on their personal experience) that vaccines are harmful and they will try to dissuade others from getting vaccinated. While I don’t necessarily disbelieve these people’s experiences, the data on vaccines overwhelmingly indicates that these severe reactions are very rare and that our world's overall health would be much worse were there were no vaccines. 

Because we know that vaccines are vastly more beneficial than harmful to the overall population, we have to find some other way to help the people that have been hurt by vaccines that doesn’t include discontinuing their population-wide administration or attempting to undermine societal trust in vaccines. Likewise, when it comes to the church, the data overwhelmingly indicates that it is a major positive influence on its members and society, and so we have to find other ways to help those that have been truly hurt that doesn’t include undermining the institutional integrity and societal trust of the church.  

I maintain that if critics want their arguments to be taken seriously, then they need to stop relying on broad-brush caricatures and stereotypes of the church and its members. They need to stop relying on personal anecdotes. They need to rely on data that doesn’t include using vague Utah statistics as a proxy for Mormonism. They need to provide data that rivals the data I have shared here; to my knowledge, no such data exists. 

Notes on Utah:

Using Utah as a proxy for Mormonism isn’t useless, but you do need to use evidence other than raw statistics (like peer reviewed studies) from Utah to back up your claims. Here are some Utah statistics that critics often conveniently ignore:

Utah Anti-depressants and Suicide

Geographic studies indicate that many areas with significant Latter-day Saint populations are less likely to use antidepressants. Utah County has one of the highest Latter-day Saint populations in Utah but the Utah Department of Health reports that Provo—the largest city in Utah County—has the lowest antidepressant usage in Utah. Idaho also has a large per capita Latter-day Saint population, but it is below average for antidepressant usage.

According to Gallup’s "National Health and Well-Being Index" Utah is the 5th happiest and healthiest state in the country.  

According to the Behavioral Factor Surveillance System, a survey taken by the federal government across states, Utah was ranked # 1 in life satisfaction.

Utah has high suicide and life satisfaction rates. There is research showing Highly happy areas also have high suicide rates. These paradoxical findings of high happiness rates combined with high suicide and depression rates are also found in other areas like some Scandinavian countries. One possible theory is that the decision to commit suicide is driven by comparison effects, and people who are depressed could feel worse if they are in a happy context. There is plenty of evidence that the church is responsible for the high happiness rates in Utah but not for the high suicide or anti depressant rates.

Utah is part of a region of the the U.S. that researchers call the suicide belt, which includes states such as Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Alaska and Wyoming. These states have always had higher suicide rates than the rest of the country for decades. Researchers have argued that the reason why these states have such high suicide rates is because they all share common characteristics like high elevation, easy access to lots of guns, a high percentage of white and native american populations (both racial groups have the highest suicide rates in the country), and they have a lot of people who live in rural and isolated areas that are more likely to generate feelings of loneliness. These rural areas are also less likely to have the necessary mental health services that are more accessible to those living in cities. Now one characteristic that these states do not share is the LDS church, and it would be laughable to argue that the LDS church is the reason why people in Nevada, Alaska, and Oregon, are committing suicide. One thing to also keep in mind is that while Utah’s suicide rate is high compared to the rest of the country, it’s actually considered average when you do an apples to apples comparison to all the states within the suicide belt

Utah’s Alcohol Laws

Utah has the lowest percentage of alcohol-impaired traffic fatalities in the U.S. in 2019, and in a 2014 report, Utah has the lowest alcohol-attributed deaths in an 11 state analysis. It is also below the national average of reported binge drinking, reported drinking before driving, and DUI arrests. Evidence shows that these positive statistics stem from a combination of both the culture and the laws, both of which are influenced by the church via the word of wisdom and the church’s lobbying for strict alcohol laws with the Utah legislature.

Utah’s Economic Benefits

In an article published in the magazine American Affairs “Utah’s Economic Exceptionalism”, economist Natlie Gochnour cites data showing that Utah has the lowest income inequality and some of the highest rates of social mobility in the country. Social mobility refers to odds that a child will earn more than his or her parents did at the same age. Utah also has the highest levels of social capital in the country which refers to the network of relationships in a society that enables it to function effectively. Social scientists who have studied these findings in depth have concluded that they are largely due to the LDS church’s influence on the conduct of its members. 

Sexual Assault/ Abuse in the LDS Church

There isn’t as much evidence on this issue, but we still have enough evidence to draw solid conclusions. For example, when we look at populations of practicing and faithful Mormons we don’t find that sexual assault is higher than in the general population. It’s the opposite. At BYU, two campus climate surveys have been conducted in 2017 and 2022 in which they found that sexual assault rates are much lower at BYU than at other college campuses. BYU had a sexual assault rate of 7.4% whereas other universities tend to have a rate of 19-25%. It’s also important to note that around 50% of the victims in the survey reported that the perpetrator was not even affiliated with BYU. Given that the relationship between alcohol consumption is strongly correlated with sexual violence victimization and perpetration, and given that BYU is the driest campus in the country, it is likely that the Word of Wisdom and BYU’s Honor Code play a large role in the low sexual assault rates at BYU.

Regarding child abuse, the data regarding the Boy Scouts of America abuse lawsuit (of which the church is involved) can be useful as well. For example, before the church cut ties with the BSA in 2019, they made up about 20% of all scouts and 37% of all scout troops. Yet of the 84,000 cases being brought to the courts against the BSA, the church only makes up 2.6% to 9.2% (depending on which source you consult). Even if we accept the highest estimate, the church is very much underrepresented when we compare the percentage of abuse cases to their actual representation in the BSA

Doxey et al. (1997) hypothesized that religion has a protective influence against mental illness for victims of child sexual abuse. Their study examined survey data from 5,417 women who participated in a Preparation for Marriage assessment typically administered to students enrolled in a marriage and family college course or college students who participated in premarital counseling. Of the 5,417 surveys included in this study, 13% reported having experienced sexual abuse as a child, of which 286 reported membership in the Church of Jesus Christ. Doxey et al. (1997) reported no significant difference found for affiliation and rates of experiencing child sexual abuse. Two relevant findings for the overall sample emerged from the data. Abused women scored lower on all measures of mental health including emotional maturity, depression, relationship stability, and self-esteem.

Additionally, women scoring as highly religious scored highest on all indicators of being mentally healthy. Religion was found to have a stronger relationship to mental health than to the experience of having been abused as a child. Those reporting high religiosity had generally higher mean scores on measures of mental health than did those who reported not having been abused. For example, using a depression scale ranging from 0 to 4, those who reported not having been abused had a mean score of 2.67, while those reporting high religiosity had a mean score of 2.82 (in this case a higher score signifies lower levels of depression). For relationship stability, those reporting not having been abused had a mean score of 2.93, while those reporting high religiosity had a mean score of 3.02. Doxey et al. (1997) suggest that being highly religious and not having experienced abuse is most highly related to mental health. This group was followed by high religiosity and having been abused, then medium religiosity and no abuse, medium religiosity and abuse, low religiosity and no abuse, and finally low religiosity and abuse. This trend held constant across each variable related to mental health, with the higher religious group reporting higher mental health. In other words, those who had been abused but who were highly religious showed higher mental health scores than those who reported no abuse and low religiosity. The LDS groups scored highest on all measures of mental health. This study concludes that both membership in the Church of Jesus Christ and being more religious “seem to have an additive effect with having no sexual abuse in being associated with more positive mental health scores” (Doxey et al., p. 186).