Mental Health Religion & Culture
September 9, 2026
Mia J. Wild, Oleg N. Medvedev
In daily life, resilience helps us bounce back from challenges, staying strong in both mind and body. Yet, many attempts to strengthen resilience have had limited success. We explored whether practicing meditation for over a year might lead to higher resilience by comparing 94 long-term meditators with an equal number of non-meditators, matched by age and sex. We found that the meditators...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
September 13, 2024
Simon Dein
4 citations
This review paper focuses upon bereavement related perceptions (also called bereavement hallucinations). It begins with a discussion of the literature on the epidemiology, phenomenology, cultural variation and the transformative nature of such perceptions. There follows a critical discussion of the role of bereavement hallucinations in the origins of early Christianity and more specifically...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
September 13, 2020
T. Dallas, Noelle Marina Baroutsa, S. Dein
10 citations
ABSTRACT The present critical review examines the role of religious healing in mental health in Greece. After describing the history of psychiatry in Greece, and the close links between medicine and religion, we discuss the role of various ritual contexts in healing mental distress. Findings suggest that supernatural explanatory models of mental illness, such as the evil eye and spirit...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
November 26, 2017
Justina Kaselionyte, Andrew Gumley
7 citations
ABSTRACT Meditation, an ancient Eastern spiritual practice, is increasingly being practised in the West where its benefits for mental and physical health have been established. Extreme mental states that can be encountered in the context of meditation have also been reported and often have been labelled as psychosis or spiritual emergency. This study aimed for more nuanced understanding of the...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
June 27, 2011
Heather A. Mastrianno
3 citations
The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Zen meditation on security and satisfaction in monogamous relationships. Levels of security and satisfaction as described by interpersonal theorist Harry Stack Sullivan, as well as meditation experience, were analysed via survey data. Data were collected via the Internet from 405 men and women who were 18 years of age or older and had...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
February 16, 2010
Simon R. Jones
11 citations
The paradigm within which hallucinations are studied, and the explanatory frameworks employed, may bias the phenomenological analysis of these experiences. After introducing the new term, hallucination, this paper undertook an inter-disciplinary study of the phenomenology of hallucinations identified by the sixteenth-century theologians, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila. It was...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
December 8, 2008
David J. Wilde, Craig D. Murray
38 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have become a topic of increasing interest to medical and psychological researchers over the last 35 years. During the course of this research agenda, several studies have focused on the phenomenology of the experience and its after-effects, mostly from a nomothetic stance. The aim of this study was to investigate the experience of having an NDE and what meaning...
Mental Health Religion & Culture
May 1, 1999
Elizabeth R. Valentine, Philip L. G. Sweet
408 citations
Abstract The performance of concentrative and mindfulness meditators on a test of sustained attention (Wilkins' counting test) was compared with controls. Both groups of meditators demonstrated superior performance on the test of sustained attention in comparison with controls, and long-term meditators were superior to short-term meditators. Mindfulness meditators showed superior performance in...