Dr Harold Koenig is founding co-director of The Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical School. The center was founded in 1998 to conduct research, and promote dialogue and discussions around spirituality, religion and health.
He’s authored nearly 700 scientific peer-reviewed articles and given testimony on Capitol Hill on the benefits of religion and health. He regularly trains chaplains and religious leaders across all the branches of the U.S. military. His work shows significant evidence-based studies that religion and good health are highly correlated.
His work, unfortunately, doesn’t receive the attention it properly deserves in our increasingly secularized culture. Religion is treated as though it were a kind of primitive superstition—an archaic attempt by pre-scientific people to grapple with psychological suffering. For the medical industrial complex, suffering is a condition to avoid and if something cannot be explained through randomized controlled trials or pharmacological intervention, it is suspect. Therefore religion is rarely seriously studied as an antidote and rarely reimbursed within medical systems. It is dismissed as intellectually unsophisticated.
And yet the rise of mental disorders go hand in hand with the decline in religion. In the 50’s, more than 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. Today, it stands at 68%, according to Gallup.
In the 80’s, about 5 to 10% of U.S. adults suffered from depression, in a given year. Today, that’s doubled. In a 2023 Gallup survey, 18% of adults said they were currently being treated for depression.
As of March 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the United States is in a mental health crisis, particularly among young people. At venture capital conferences, the phrase “public health crisis” is invoked with increasing regularity. I know since the term was often used during my Invent Health event series from 2017-2023. In September 2025, the World Health Organization announced that one billion people worldwide suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. Its Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the transformation of mental health services as one of the most “pressing public health challenges of our time.”
I am not in favor of being an alarmist. The constant proclamation of crisis can become pathological. Yet this doesn’t dismiss the underlying claim as false. Rather it does underscore the depth of the problem and the insufficiency in the way we’ve addressed it — namely, society has wrongly looked at the treatments as the solution more than the diagnosis, not just in the clinical sense, but in the cultural sense.
In other words, we are more than likely misidentifying normal human suffering as pathology. Therefore isn’t the mental health crisis people speak of really a crisis of culture and character that only religion can address?
This is my personal view and it’s why Dr. Koenig’s work is so important. Religion is the only prescription for mental health that helps people understand the suffering that is necessary and the suffering that may be genuinely a disorder. He has reviewed and written countless number of evidence-based peer reviewed studies that show religion is by far the best prescription for our mental health.
In our interview, we talk about those studies but also why psychotropics continue to be the No. 1 intervention offered for those with mental disorders; the expansion of the DSM; and the enduring stigma surrounding religion amongst scientists.
You can follow Dr. Koenig’s work at the center here: https://spiritualityandhealth.duke.edu
Here are workshops he’s giving on mental health and religion.
Here are some important studies on mental health and religion (courtesy Dr. Koenig):
Interview coverage:
1:00 - Origins of integrating religion and health.
2:05 - Dr. Koenig’s religious journey.
4:34 - Behind the quantitative peer-reviewed research and defining “religious intervention.”
7:54 - The challenge comparing the five major religions and mental health effects.
9:55 - Evidence showing causation and not just correlation. Many studies included in the “Handbook of Religion & Health.” Plus “RCBT” - religious cognitive behavioral therapy.
12:13 - The difference between CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and RCBT.
14:56 - Why does religion work? Religion gives hope, purpose, meaning, a forgiving disposition and respect for one’s body as the temple of God.
17:01 - Why are psychotropics still the No. 1 first-line intervention for mental illness?
22:06 - About 20% of the population probably suffers from biological mental health disorders. And this has been consistent over time. The secularization of America has affected the other 80% who cannot deal with life's vagaries.
24:58 - Has increased secularization of society disrupted brain development in young children?
27:25 - The importance of suffering and how it is avoided in secular treatments.
30:14 - The expansion of the DSM and labeling forms of suffering.
33:28 - Moral injury officially recognized as a mental disorder after being included in the DSM in 2025.
39:45 - Self-reported mental health diagnostics - PHQ-9 and GAD-7 - vs brain scans and other biomarker tests?
47:00 - How the theological center made its way into Duke Medical School.
49:58 - The Center’s biggest impact and legacy.
