Mind Moves: Among the many therapeutic interventions that research has found to enhance physical and mental health, one remains remarkably conspicuous by its absence - having a religious belief.
The vast research, which correlates religious practice with proactive health practices, with physiological healing and psychological reassurance remains primarily ignored in the present phenomenal public discourses about health and illness. This is intriguing, given our current preoccupation with health.
Consider the vast array of therapies advertised today for every conceivable and many implausible psychic problems we allegedly acquire by virtue of being alive.
Like hypochondriacs perusing medical dictionaries of symptoms to discover that they suffer signs of all described diseases, the hypnotic power of the hypothetical has ensnared us. We now, perhaps, believe that we are not, cannot be and will never, ever be complete, fulfilled, healed, realised, actualised, found, recouped, at one with our inner child, ego-esteemed, ontologically secure and satisfied until we have endured the rigours of confronting the "self", whoever, whatever or how many that/those self-same selves may be.
And that is just the start of our pursuit of the personality, the persona and other potential psychological pitfalls. Becoming "complete" is becoming exhausting in this epidemic of ego-enhancing interventionist obsessive behaviour. Freud had a point when he only promised his patients that he would turn their "neurotic misery" into ordinary "human unhappiness". The pursuit of happiness: the belief that superlative, untouchable, sustainable, happiness is possible is a psychological odyssey without end.
This is not in any way to denigrate the important place of therapy: the liberation of therapy with trained therapists in confidential contexts to deal respectfully with real and relevant issues in people's emotional lives. This work is serious. It is diminished by salacious "Springer"-type television exposure, unethical intrusion and public consumption of the vulnerabilities of others that pose as therapy.
Casting a critical eye on this public confessional trend by which the untrained in psychotherapy expose the susceptible to dubious momentary mass media celebrity is a challenge to the big buck business of self-help hyperbole.
But it is, perhaps timely, to ask why we are preoccupied with the unobtainable? It is time to ask why we are searching, what we are seeking, from whom, with what consequences and when will we know that we have found what we are looking for.
Perhaps it is also opportune to ask why we would dismiss, from consideration, if only at a purely pragmatic level, the research that shows the physiological and psychological advantage and assurance that having a religious belief contains for those who have religious belief.
Research on the relationship between religion and health includes findings of better health behaviour, increased life-expectancy with lower rates of death from cirrhosis of the liver, from emphysema, immune system enhancement, pre-surgery calm, shorter hospital stays, recovery from depression, bereavement healing, increased social support and social participation.
And spiritual belief enhances not just health practices but creativity, artistic endeavour, literary imagination, scientific pursuit. From Albert Einstein's affirmation of the relevance of the Divine, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the pinnacle of which is the therapeutic power of the transcendent, to the seminal work of such thinkers and therapists as Carl Jung, Gordon Allport, Michael Argyle, Viktor Frankl, there are many works affirming the relevance of religion in our lives. There is an extraordinary contradiction then between the preoccupation with health and the dismissal of religion, given the benefits of the latter upon the former.
Recent societal analyses have also demonstrated the inverse relationship between happiness and prosperity: that economic restoration may have caused a reduction in social capital or, to put it another way, the more we have, the meaner we are, the more we have, the more miserable we are, the more miserable we are, the more we want. This is a social conundrum and societal challenge.
Is what we seek more easily and freely available through religion, more gently and generously given, more altruistic in its aspirations, more inclusive in its invitation, more meaningful in its message and less transitory in its transcendent horizons.
All religions have something to offer. Maybe, for example, a religion that has at its core the command "that you love one another" and all that love entails in real enactment is not a bad social model, psychosocial system and psychological intervention for our times regardless of belief. After all, religion may have got there first with the good life, if you consider the fortune we spend on deprivational therapy, gratification delay, essential oil and incense burning, uplifting incantation, music therapy, food guides, individual and group therapy, autogenic training and meditation. Do fasting, lent, benediction, choirs, fish for Friday, confession sacraments and prayer sound similar? Intriguing.
• Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.