Religiousity and depression in Asian teenagers
What they found, particularly for Asian teenagers, was quite worrying.
Because you would expect that when teenagers become more involved in religion, they would show less symptoms of depression (such as loss of apetite, inability to shake off the blues, feeling hopeless about the future, feeling sad, feeling lonely, feeling that your life is a failure, feeling that life is not worth living). And you would expect that particularly for those who may have recently migrated to a new country, having the support of a church would actually help with feelings of depression.
They found that indeed this does hold true – but only for certain races. They found a negative relationship between religiosity and depression for white and black teenagers (that is, going to church regularly is related to lower depression). They found no relationship between religiosity and depression for latino/a teenagers.
But most surprising and troubling of all was they found a positive relationship between religiosity and depression for Asian teenagers. That is, an Asian teenager who goes to church one or more times a week reported more symptoms of depression than Asian teenagers who don’t go to church. And they found this was particularly true for Asian females. Here is what they observed:
participation is positively related to depression for Asian adolescents (b = .596, p < .05),
suggesting that Asians who attend religious services more frequently may experience cultural
tension between traditional Asian culture and mainstream American culture, resulting in higher
depression."
What is going on? Remember that white and black teenagers who also
attend church regularly do not have these same feelings, so this is not
to do with the sense of being "in the world but not of it" that a
Christians would feel. Instead it must be something else. And Petts and Joliffe suspect that it has to do with the tendency for Asian groups to reinforce culutural principles that are different to what they find in mainstream American society.
You can read the full article online for yourself here and look at their figures for the different races. Unfortunately the study was not able to determine exactly what kind of churches these Asian teenagers are going to – whether they are going to Asian churches, or non-Asian churches. I would guess that the majority would be going to Asian churches, just like in Australia – but that’s just a guess.
Yet even so, how worrying is it that it is noticeably better for the mental health of Asian teenagers to stay away from church. This research should give us serious pause to consider the effect of our ministries on the mental health of high schoolers. What is the long term effect of the way things are done in our churches? are we really being a blessing to them?
[ PS: Moore College has this journal, but if you're looking for this in the ATLA database, the Review of Religious Research has a one-year embargo, so it'll appear in ATLA next June... ]
Maybe more depressed Asian girls go to church? A shame they didn\’t subcategorise which types of church affiliation is positively associated with depressed Asian adolescents. What do you think about Asian kids at ND? Do they seem more depressed than the average Asian non-church goer in Northen Sydney? Could this just be a US thing?
Yeah, the authors noted that the causal relationship could be the other way around (ie. depressed people go to church, rather than going to church causes depression) – but they couldn\’t say from the data.No idea about what the situation would be like in Australia – but it would be an interesting exercise to get churchgoing youth to fill out a survey on depression, and then get some of their nonchurchgoing Asian friends from school to fill it out also, and then compare.