“If You Prayed More, You Would Feel Better”: The Dual Nature of Religion and Spirituality on Black Youths’ Mental Health and Access to Care in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study explores Black Canadian youth’s relationship with religion and the impact religion has on their mental health and wellbeing. In addition, we probed promising practices for religious leaders and service providers who want to improve Black youth’s access to care. The results of this article draw from a larger study that aimed to explore the barriers and facilitators to mental healthcare for Black youth in Ontario, Canada. 128 (n = 66 youth, n = 35 service providers, n = 27 family and community members; 91% Black, 24% people of colour, 67% white) participants from six regions across Ontario were engaged in 23 qualitative focus groups held virtually between March 2020 and August 2021. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Three themes emerged from the data: The stigma and taboo nature of mental illness, the influence of religion and mental health and suggestions to improve care for Black youth. Mental illness is stigmatized in specific ways in Black communities and intergenerational differences exist in how mental illness is conceptualized. In addition, Black Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and other diverse or marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities (2SLGBTQ+) youth face additional difficulties in relation to stigma. Religion and religious affiliation stigmatized mental illness yet, both were considered important for inclusion in traditional mental health supports. To improve access to care for Black youth, there is a need for community-practitioner partnerships, incorporating religion into traditional mental healthcare, and increasing mental health awareness in religious and community spaces. This study is among the first to explore the impact of religion on Black youth’s mental health, findings can contribute to increased access to affirming and responsive care for this population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".