In this excerpt from his thesis Dr Ramesh Manocha further discusses how the link between religion and mental health is not always positive.
As stated previously, the association between religiosity and mental health is not always positive. Larson’s (1992) review of studies exploring the relationship between religious commitment and mental health reported that while 72% described a positive relationship, 16% reported a negative relationship. This proportion is somewhat higher than would be expected by chance alone. Some scholars propose that this wide variation in benefit/detriment may be explained by underlying “essential factors” which although common to all forms of religiosity, vary in their presence, magnitude and the interactions between various other factors.
The persistent association between mental silence experience and health outcomes inevitably leads to the idea that the valence of internal experience might provide some explanation for the association between religiosity and health, across different forms of religiosity.