Have You Been Neglecting Half of Your Health?

Recent research has shown that regular Mass attendance is linked to better mental health among young adults aged 18 to 35, something the Church has known for centuries.

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

We are more focused on mental health than ever — and mental health is getting worse. A research psychologist and a 15-century tradition both point toward the same remedy.

There comes a point — usually sometime in your 40s, sometimes earlier, sometimes later — when the body stops being forgiving. The diet that worked at 30 stops working. Sleep becomes a discipline rather than a default. Exercise moves from optional to necessary. Most people accept this without much argument. The body’s needs are visible and undeniable, and our current culture has enough language for them.

The mind’s needs, most of the time, are less visible and much easier to defer. Mental health care still carries, in many circles, a faint suggestion of either weakness or indulgence — something for the anxious, the fragile, the people who have not learned to manage. Stoicism gets misread as virtue. Endurance gets confused with health. And so the interior life accumulates pain and distress in the same way the body does, until at some point the invoice arrives and it is larger than expected.

The Catholic tradition has always insisted this framing is wrong — not because it is insufficiently compassionate, but because it is philosophically incoherent. The Catechism is direct on the point: “Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity” (CCC 364). The human person is not a soul driving a body, or a body occasionally troubled by a soul. Body and mind and spirit are one thing, and what damages one damages all. Neglecting your mental health is not virtue or strength. It is poor stewardship of the person God made.

But there is a twist. However, before we get into it, one point needs to be clearly made. Mental health is a health issue and just as diabetes and high blood pressure don't get "prayed away," mental health issues must be addressed not as spiritual maladies but as health issues. If you are experiencing mental health issues, please see a professional.

Now for the twist. Writing in the New York Times this week, research psychologist Clay Routledge makes a provocative argument: Our preoccupation with mental health may itself be part of the problem. Americans are more focused on mental health than at any other point in history — and yet, by multiple measures, mental health is getting worse. Over the past several decades, the percentage of Americans reporting poor mental health has risen steadily. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But the ever-expanding clinical vocabulary, the self-diagnosis culture, the social media posts normalizing anxiety disorders — these may be inadvertently making people more vulnerable to psychological distress, not less. “The more fixated we are on mental health,” Routledge writes, “the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences.”

His remedy is striking for how closely it mirrors what the Catholic tradition has always proposed. For many, he notes, exercise does as good a job reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression as psychotherapy or medication — and in some cases better. Acts of kindness toward others proved more effective than cognitive-behavioral exercises in one study: people who focused on someone else’s problems improved more than those who focused on their own. And meaning — the sense that one matters, that one plays an important role in other people’s lives — is among the strongest predictors of resilience against depression, anxiety, and despair.

The Catholic tradition has been saying all of this, in a slightly different language, for 15 centuries or more. The examination of conscience — systematized by Ignatius of Loyola as a daily discipline of interior attention — is structured self-awareness, not obsessive self-scrutiny. The difference is the direction of travel: the examination ends in gratitude, in resolution, in encounter with God — not in a deeper spiral inward. Spiritual direction provides what Routledge would call accountability and outward orientation. The corporal and spiritual works of mercy — feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, instructing the ignorant — are, among other things, a prescription for getting out of your own head and into someone else’s life.

A recent study of Catholic diocesan approaches to mental health found that the most effective frameworks were those that integrated spiritual and communal dimensions alongside clinical ones — precisely because the Catholic understanding of the person refuses to reduce the interior life to brain chemistry alone. The soul is not a metaphor. It is the form of the body, as Aristotle (and then Aquinas) put it, and its health is not separable from the health of the whole.

As we get older, the case for taking all of this seriously becomes more urgent. The distractions that allowed us to avoid ourselves — the busyness, the noise, the accumulated momentum of a life in motion — begin to thin. What was background becomes foreground. This is not only a psychological phenomenon but a spiritual one: the tradition has always understood the second half of life as a particular kind of invitation, a season when the interior life demands the attention it has always deserved.

Caring for your mental health is not self-indulgence. It is a response to what you are. The Church has been saying this — in the language of soul and spirit and interior life — since long before the vocabulary of psychology existed. And what the best of that tradition understood, and what Routledge’s research now confirms, is that the path to interior health tends to run outward: through the body, through the neighbor, through a life oriented toward something larger than its own maintenance.