A ‘Strong Spiritual Core’
“You’re not going to believe this,” my friend and fellow researcher Dr. Suniya Luthar said one afternoon in 2008. We were sitting in her university office, cafeteria salads awkwardly balanced on our knees, meeting to discuss how to abate the significantly elevated rates of depression our field was seeing across the United States.
I’d known Suniya since I was an undergrad at Yale and she was the teaching assistant for my abnormal psychology class. Sitting in her class as a nineteen-year-old, I’d been inspired to see this lively, engaging woman, so radiant she practically sparkled, who was also an intense academic. With Suniya, there was never any small talk. Intelligent and intense, she looked at the world with laser focus. She was a scientist’s scientist—following the trail of the numbers, striving to get to the bottom of a mystery or problem. Her early work on the intersection between poverty and mental health had contributed to the formation of Head Start programs, and had modeled the power of science to change and improve lives. Now she was a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia, still committed to doing research that supported the welfare of kids, especially teens growing up in under-resourced urban areas. Because rates of depression shoot up between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it was vital to focus on adolescents if we were to curb the growing epidemic.
As we crunched our bland lettuce, Suniya filled me in on the recent surprising turn in her research. She had been looking for a comparison group for the urban youth population she was studying, and had begun investigating upper-middle-class teens in affluent suburbs outside of New York City, San Francisco, and other major U.S. cities. But as she learned more about these affluent suburban comparison groups, she found that the “privileged” or “rich” kids were doing markedly worse in several measures than their less affluent peers. They had much higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and anxiety, and despite having resources and physical safety, felt more vulnerable and fearful.
The finding surprised many people in the field. By and large, the affluent kids had engaged and supportive parents, they went to highly ranked schools, they had the resources for enrichment activities and travel, they enjoyed many educational, professional, and social opportunities and never wanted for food to eat or safe streets to walk. Why were they so depressed?
By going into the schools and interviewing kids, Suniya had identified a social ecology that she thought explained their mental suffering. For one thing, the majority of affluent kids in her study had perceptions of contingent love from their parents and families. They said things like “My dad shows up at my soccer games, but not at family dinner,” or “My mom asks me, ‘How did you do on the math test?,’ not ‘How are you feeling?’” Many of the kids said they felt like commodities. Their job was to perform—academically, athletically, musically—and earn their parents’ approval. Endless attention was paid to report cards and trophies and rankings. No one said, “I’m so happy to see you.”
“If they’re not achieving, they feel inadequate,” Suniya said. “And if they are achieving, they’re in a state of fear of not achieving. They’re self-medicating by the droves just to try to ease this chronic anxiety about their worth.”
A similar negative social ecology existed among their peer groups as well. When she studied the predictors of popularity, she found that for girls, the behaviors that went hand in hand with popularity were being skinny and using interpersonal aggression to establish dominance—essentially, being a “mean girl.” For boys, it was substance abuse and exploitation of girls. Value was a measure of the number on the scale, the list of sexual conquests, a tally of wins and losses, accomplishments and failures.
Suniya was in the midst of a longitudinal study, tracking kids from adolescence to adulthood, from age twelve to twenty-four, and asked if I’d work with her and add some spirituality measures to the study.
A few years later, she and our grad student Sam Barkin came to my office at Columbia to share some initial findings. They found that among the affluent youth, the rate of spirituality was significantly lower than in the population at large. Only 15 percent of the kids from highly resourced suburbs reported that they had a personal spiritual identity or practice—a rate of spirituality less than one-quarter the national rate published in Pew and Gallup polls.
They also found that the 85 percent of the sample who were not spiritual had over tenfold the national rate of risk for sociopathy. Socialized in a culture that equated their worth with how fat or skinny they were, or whether they got an A or a B on the last exam, they had no unconditional love or sense of connection as a bedrock. They’d grown up lonely and disconnected, using others and being used in an achievement game.
I stepped over the piles of books and papers on the floor of my office so I could look out the small window. Clouds shifted, and weak winter sunlight washed over the brick and concrete and bare trees. Students hurried between buildings, their backs hunched under heavy packs, heads hunkered down against the wind.
“There’s more,” Sam said. “The fifteen percent who do consider themselves spiritual are not experiencing the elevated, through-the-roof anxiety, depression, and substance abuse of the rest of the cohort.”
The cross-sectional leg of the data didn’t prove that spirituality causes better mental health. But, once again, it showed that spirituality strongly correlates with a reduced rate of suffering. That if you are spiritual, you are protected and inured from otherwise increased risk.
A few more years later, I saw the results on spiritual development and mental health for the kids Suniya had followed since age twelve who were now twenty-four, most of them finished with college and on to jobs or graduate school. We saw that those who were high in spirituality at age eighteen, even if they experienced doubt and depression during college, emerged on the other side with strong spirituality. These young adults, who’d been spiritual as eighteen-year-olds and had maintained or renewed their spiritual life in their twenties, were much less likely to be depressed, much less likely to abuse substances, and more likely to be in healthy relationships and to join organizations or communities of contribution. A strong spiritual core gave these young people a whole different life.
From the book THE AWAKENED BRAIN by Lisa Miller. Copyright © 2021 by Lisa Miller. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Author photography by Nina Subin.
