Women Who Stay Religious Less Likely to Have Anxiety Disorder

Women Who Stay Religious Less Likely to Have Anxiety Disorder
Tuesday, January 1, 2008; 12:00 AM

TUESDAY, Jan. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Women who stop being religiously active are three times more likely to suffer generalized anxiety disorder than women who have always been religiously active, researchers report.

In contrast, the researchers found that men who stopped being religiously active were less likely to suffer major depression compared with men who had always been religiously active.

"One's lifetime pattern of religious service attendance can be related to psychiatric illness," study co-author Joanna Maselko said in a prepared statement. She is an assistant professor of public health at Temple University.

Maselko and her team analyzed data from 718 adults who shared details of their religious activity in youth and adulthood. They found that a majority of the respondents changed their level of religious activity between childhood and adulthood. The data is published in the January issue ofSocial Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.
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When I was writing my book there were things I had to address but really didn't want to. One of the chapters addressed how I feel about the soul and the connection between us and God. It was hard because faith has always been very personal to me, at least my own faith. I have a hard time talking about it, but I'm fine talking about the Bible, God, Jesus with anyone. After all, you have to remember that is also my job as administrator of Christian Ed.

When it is about my personal relationship with Christ and God, I usually begin to weep if I have to speak of it, so I've been holding off writing about this. I guess I was waiting for someone else to do it.

I keep saying that I don't have PTSD but I never really said why. I've addressed the issue that I believe it is the sensitive people who end up with PTSD especially the people involved with violent trauma instead of natural disasters. I am one of the sensitive people. The choir at church makes me cry at least once a week and sometimes I'm not talking about a trickle running down my cheek. I see so much suffering that it's hard for my family to be able to understand why or how I do what I do. They know how it effects me. It all boils down to my faith.

I know the Bible very well from growing up in a family of believers all the way up to the most compelling reason I had to read the Bible. I went to a Greek church and didn't understand much of the language at all. I was also a very curious person, interested in history, so I read it, and read it, and read it. I came away with my own ideas about the kind of faith Christ was talking about and to me that was the point of the people who wrote the Bible.

I survived growing up with a violent alcoholic father, who stopped drinking when I was 13. I had been beaten, in a terrible car accident and almost died from an infection. This was not the beginning of my survival days because that would have started when I was 4 years old. I was pushed off a slide and fell head first on concrete. Ever since that day, the first time someone said, "she should have died but survived" I haven't been afraid to die. Reading the Bible helped me to understand where that attitude came from. I'm not saying I've never been afraid but I've never been afraid of dying.

Maybe that's the key to all of this. I keep addressing the need to treat the spiritual with the psychological and base it on the faith the person happens to have. There is tremendous healing power linking the two together. We all know scientist know very little about the power of the soul and mostly they attribute what the soul does to what the mind does. They never really put it into its proper placement of importance. They need to first understand the soul of man before they can address the healing of the minds of man. All elements are part of who we are, what we think, our character and past as a determination of our futures.

Given the odds of PTSD as one out of three it can be the only reason I have not developed it. I have all the characteristics of those who have been wounded by it and exposed to more than my share of traumatic events. I have nightmares doing what I do because of the pictures I have to look at and stay up late at night worrying about people who contact me. I also I cry a hell of a lot, yet I don't have PTSD. I say it's by the grace of God I don't because had it not been for my faith, I doubt I'd be here now. I do the work I do because of it. I feel the compassion I do because of it. People find me because they are lead to find me. I fell in love with a Vietnam vet with PTSD and that caused me to do what I do. It's all linked together. It is carried onto our daughter who was raised the way she was because of the way I was raised. It is also a circle.

Don't dismiss the spiritual especially when you are looking at the psychological. They are connected.


UPDATE This came in an alert about 15 minutes after I posted this. God does work in very strange ways.

The (research) question: Is there a God spot in the brain?

Neuroscientists study this question because they want to better understand the neural basis of a phenomenon that plays a central role in the lives of so many.

“These experiences have existed since the dawn of humanity. They have been reported across all cultures,” Mario Beauregard says. “It is as important to study the neural basis of [religious] experience as it is to investigate the neural basis of emotion, memory or language.”

Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can be tied to a specific place in the brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Beauregard seeks to pinpoint the brain areas that are active while the nuns recall the most powerful religious epiphany of their lives, a time they experienced a profound connection with the divine.

Using fMRI and other tools of modern neuroscience, researchers are attempting to pin down what happens in the brain when people experience mystical awakenings during prayer and meditation or during spontaneous utterances inspired by religious fervor.

Because of the positive effect of such experiences on those who have them, some researchers speculate that the ability to induce them artificially could transform people’s lives by making them happier, healthier and better able to concentrate.

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http://malaysianunplug.blogspot.com/2008/01/searching-for-god-in-human-brain.html