Faith and Health: Psychological Perspectives is a book of scientific psychology on the relationship between religious faith and health. Edited by Thomas G. Plante and Allen C. Sherman, the book was published in the United States in 2001.
The book includes 16 chapters divided among four major parts that focus on general population outcomes (such as impacts on longevity), outcomes in special populations such as medical patients or adolescents, clinical implications, and overall criticisms and reflections.
Faith and Health has been reviewed in several professional journals, including Contemporary Psychology,<ref name=richards03/> Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,<ref name=boehnlein02/> and others.<ref name=king02/><ref name=martin02/>
Topics Covered
Faith and Health contains 16 chapters written by various psychological or biomedical researchers, and some of them are notable. Chapter titles and authors are listed in the table (below, at right). After an introductory chapter, the remaining 15 chapters are divided into four major parts.
The book's first part focuses on the faith/health relation in the general population. Chapter 2 by Carl E. Thoresen and his colleagues describes the existing empirical evidence, and discusses many methodological issues. The authors view the evidence as indicating that religious/spiritual factors "appear to be associated with physical, mental, and overall health, but the lack of adequate controls and designs in many studies has seriously limited our understanding of these relationships." The authors also note methodological challenges related to the need for more studies that follow participants over time, rather than observing them only once; the need to recognize that if religion and spirituality operate through other factors, they may be very influential but remain unrecognized, because they do not explain unique variance; and the need for more experimental studies. The authors also present a "working model... that tries to capture several factors that may be involved in the pathways connecting [religious/spiritual] factors with health," and highlight four studies<ref name=hummer99></ref><ref name=musick04></ref><ref name=oman98></ref><ref name=strawbridge97></ref> that investigated religion/spirituality and health relationships using "state-of-the-art epidemiological designs"
In chapter 3, Michael McCullough reviewed evidence for relations between religious involvement and mortality. McCullough describes results of a meta-analysis of 42 independent estimates of the association between religious involvement and length of life, reporting that "religious people had, on average, 29% higher odds of survival during any follow-up period than did less religious people" Other chapters looked at religion and health in late adulthood, and at the role of forgiveness and unforgiveness. A final chapter discussed how religiousness and spirituality is assessed in health research.
The second part focuses on faith and health in special populations. These include adolescents who are at risk for abusing tobacco and alcohol, as well as those with cancer or HIV/AIDS. The section also discusses how religious faith is related to mental health outcomes, such as well-being, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorders. It concluded that "Most research examining the relationship between religion and spirituality and mental health outcomes shows positive associations."
Part three addresses implications of the faith/health relationships for the clinic. Chapters discuss implications for psychotherapy, rehabilitation medicine. A chapter by Tan and Dong offers dangers and guidelines for implementing spiritually-informed interventions that may include components such as meditation, forgiveness, prayer, solitude, the laying on of hands, fellowship, and worship, observing that "as health care providers implement religiously or spiritually oriented interventions, it is crucial that they do so with the utmost ethical caution and professional care."