Belief in Miracles, Religious/Spiritual Struggles, and Depressive Symptoms: Exploring Variation among American Indian, South Asian, and White Cohorts in the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health.

Abstract

Belief in miracles is widespread, extending to many religious traditions, societies, and cultures. This study examines the relationship between a belief that God heals physical illness through miracles with depressive symptoms, and the possible moderating role of religious/spiritual (R/S) struggles in buffering or exacerbating this relationship. We utilize the Study on Stress, Spirituality and Health (SSSH), which provides a wide array of R/S data, including on South Asian (SA) and American Indian (AI) respondents for which there is an extreme lack of research. Results suggest that American Indians were almost twice as likely as South Asians or White nurses to believe in miracles by God in response to illness. We documented null associations between belief in miracles and depressive symptoms in the American Indian and South Asian samples, but a belief in miracles was linked to lower depressive symptoms among mostly White women (all of whom were employed as nurses, unlike the SA and AI samples). Across all three groups, R/S struggles had a stronger association with greater depressive symptoms for those who did not believe in miracles compared to those who did. We discuss possible directions for further research and encourage future work to explore how the various dimensions of R/S predict health and well-being and disease etiology beyond predominantly White U.S-based samples.