An Inquiry into Spirituality and Psychological Well-being

The word spirituality is derived from the Latin word spiritus which literally means breath, to blow and to breathe. Spirituality is a word used in an abundance of contexts that means different things for different people at different times in different cultures. Thus, spirituality is increasingly used to refer to the personal, subjective side of religious experience. Religious and spiritual factors have been closely related to health practices throughout the history. Recent researches suggest that spirituality based coping strategies e.g. prayer, faith etc. have shown beneficial effects for mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, and other mental illness but few studies reported little or no association between spiritual factors and mental health. Hence, the present study reviews the association between these two variables.