Reclaiming the Soul in Psychiatry: The Vital Role of Spirituality in Mental Health
In a world increasingly shaped by data and diagnoses, the soul has quietly slipped from view in modern mental health care. Yet behind the labels and neurotransmitters, people continue to seek meaning, connection, and transcendence. They wrestle with grief, wonder, and awe. They ask questions that no prescription can answer: Who am I? Why am I here? What holds me when everything else falls apart? This is the terrain of spirituality. And it is time we reclaim it as vital to the healing process.
Religion and Spirituality: The Map and the Terrain
To begin, it is helpful to distinguish between religion and spirituality. Religion can be viewed as a map. It is a system of beliefs, practices, and structures that guide adherents along a path. Spirituality, in contrast, is the terrain itself. It is the lived experience of connection, the internal landscape of awe, purpose, and meaning.
Maps serve an important purpose. They help people navigate complex territory. However, a map is not the same as the terrain. Spirituality may find expression through religion, but it is not limited by it. Many people today identify as spiritual but not religious, while others experience deep spiritual meaning within their religious tradition. For mental health professionals, understanding this distinction enables the provision of inclusive, respectful, and personalized care.
Why Spirituality Matters: The Evidence
Spirituality is more than a philosophical concept. Research is increasingly demonstrating its relevance to physical and mental health.
Spirituality has been linked to lower rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, and suicide (Bonelli & Koenig, 2013).
Individuals with stronger spirituality often show greater psychological resilience, especially after trauma or loss (Park, 2005).
Spirituality is associated with increased well-being, life satisfaction, and a deeper sense of purpose (VanderWeele et al., 2017).
Practices such as meditation, prayer, and spiritual reflection influence brain structure and function, affecting areas like the default mode network, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex (Newberg et al., 2010; Brewer et al., 2011).
These findings reveal that spirituality plays a significant role in shaping how people process emotions, organize experiences, and integrate meaning. Each of these is crucial for maintaining mental health and promoting healing.
The Symbolic Bridge: From Sensation to Pattern
To understand how spirituality influences our internal world, it is helpful to explore how the mind organizes experience. At the most fundamental level, we interact with the world through our senses. These raw impressions (what we see, hear, touch, and feel) form the foundation of our lived reality. However, these sensations do not remain in isolation. They are shaped and given meaning through symbols: language, metaphor, image, and narrative. Over time, these symbols evolve into internal patterns that shape our behavior, identity, and beliefs.
Spirituality often resides in the realm of symbols. A ritual, a chant, a sacred text, or a moment of silence can carry profound meaning because it connects sensorial feeling with internal structure. Spirituality, then, becomes a bridge between the raw immediacy of experience and the deeper frameworks that hold and guide us.
For example, when someone describes feeling "held by something greater" during a crisis, they are using symbolic language to transform emotional intensity into a coherent experience. This transformation is not a delusion. It is a psychological and neurological act of integration. It helps restore order and meaning to what may otherwise feel fragmented or overwhelming.
This interplay of the symbolic and how it bridges raw sensorial experience to patterns of experience is described in more detail in my book, The Arc of Human Experiencing: A Journey of Being and Becoming.
Spirituality and the Quest for Wholeness
At its heart, spirituality is about wholeness. It is critical to recognize that true healing encompasses more than just eliminating symptoms. It involves restoring coherence across the self: aligning thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, and beliefs into a unified experience. The way we dynamically reorganize in the direction of wholeness is the subject of my theoretical work on what I call coherogenesis.
Spirituality often serves as a compass for this restoration, pointing toward a greater whole that includes, rather than rejects, pain and struggle. By reconnecting with a sense of sacredness or deeper meaning, individuals can begin to gather the fragmented aspects of their identity and reassemble them into something new.
This is a dynamic and non-linear process. It unfolds in rhythms and cycles. In the model of coherogenesis, we might say that spirituality helps generate coherence by deepening presence, making space for meaning, and inviting mutual connection. When trauma, grief, or loss disrupt coherence, spirituality becomes a way of returning, of reorganizing experience and reestablishing contact with the essential self.
Spiritual Practices Beyond Religion
Spirituality can be cultivated without adherence to any religious tradition. Many spiritual practices are trans-religious, meaning they can be adapted and explored by people of all beliefs. These include:
Contemplative Practices: Meditation, centering prayer, or silent reflection support emotional regulation and strengthen brain networks involved in awareness and self-control (Brewer et al., 2011).
Connection to Nature: Spending time in nature increases feelings of awe and reduces brain activity linked to depressive rumination (Bratman et al., 2015).
Creative Expression: Music, visual art, writing, and movement provide symbolic pathways for exploring inner experience.
Embodied Practice: Yoga, tai chi, and breathwork help regulate the nervous system and foster interoceptive awareness (Streeter et al., 2012).
Gratitude and Forgiveness: These practices have been linked to improved psychological well-being and changes in brain activity related to positive emotions and social bonding (Kini et al., 2016).
Each of these practices invites presence. Each opens the door to mystery, meaning, and connection. None require belief in a particular doctrine, only a willingness to engage with the depths of human experience.
The Neurobiology of Spiritual Experience
Modern neuroscience is beginning to describe what spiritual practitioners have long known through direct experience. Spiritual states and practices influence the brain in specific and measurable ways:
Default Mode Network (DMN): This network is active during self-focused thought and mind-wandering. Meditation and spiritual states often quiet the DMN, making space for a sense of unity or dissolution of the ego (Brewer et al., 2011).
Amygdala: Responsible for detecting threat and generating emotional responses, the amygdala tends to become less reactive following mindfulness and compassion-based practices (Desbordes et al., 2012).
Prefrontal Cortex: Associated with executive function, attention, and emotion regulation, the prefrontal cortex is strengthened through regular contemplative practice (Tang et al., 2015).
These findings underscore the biological reality of spiritual experience. They confirm that spiritual development is not separate from the body and brain. It is embodied, measurable, and deeply intertwined with the processes that support mental health.
Integrating Spirituality into Holistic Mental Health Care
A holistic approach to mental health does not view spirituality as an optional extra. It recognizes that healing involves the whole person, including the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of life.
In an integrative psychiatry framework, a treatment plan might include:
Physical Health: Optimizing sleep, nutrition, inflammation, and hormonal balance.
Psychological Support: Psychotherapy, inner parts work, and meaning-based approaches.
Environmental and Relational Health: Creating spaces and relationships that support authenticity and growth.
Spiritual Inquiry: Encouraging reflective practice, symbolic exploration, or transpersonal insight as appropriate for the individual.
When spirituality is integrated with care rather than excluded from it, psychiatry becomes more humane, more effective, and more aligned with what people truly need. Healing becomes not just a return to baseline, but a movement toward deeper connection, coherence, and meaning.
References
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Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112
Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254–20259. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108
Desbordes, G., Negi, L. T., Pace, T. W., Wallace, B. A., Raison, C. L., & Schwartz, E. L. (2012). Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 292. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00292
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Streeter, C. C., Gerbarg, P. L., Saper, R. B., Ciraulo, D. A., & Brown, R. P. (2012). Effects of yoga on the autonomic nervous system, gamma-aminobutyric-acid, and allostasis in epilepsy, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Medical Hypotheses, 78(5), 571–579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2012.01.021
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