Templeton Foundation Awards $1.2 Million Grant for Global Training in Religion and Mental Health

The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Swayam Bagaria, Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), and Bhrigupati Singh, Senior Lecturer at the Center for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, to create Ethnos-MH, a new global, research-based training program on the anthropology of mental health and religion for mental health practitioners around the world. 

Mental health experts and associations worldwide have emphasized the need to develop religion and spirituality (R/S) training for mental health practitioners to better understand the many ways in which it matters for mental health outcomes. However, most existing training programs rely on approaches that can miss the broader psycho-social and cultural contexts that shape patient experience and wellbeing. 

Ethnos-MH aims to fill this gap by introducing psychiatrists, chaplains, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health practitioners to ethnographic approaches that illuminate the everyday connections between psychological wellbeing and religious and spiritual life—how people employ religious and spiritual practices, kinship networks, local ecologies, and ontologically diverse healing traditions to navigate illness and distress.

“At present, the gap is not between science and religion as adversarial frameworks for addressing mental health issues,” said Bagaria and Singh. “As practitioners across the world have long emphasized, mental health practice is both an art and a science. We believe that what is currently needed is more careful experience near understandings of how religion and spiritual experiences matter for mental health outcomes. We see anthropology as an ideal bridge to address this need, by bringing diverse disciplinary orientations, regional expertise, and knowledge systems together, and making mental health practice more attuned to the religious and spiritual texture of people’s lives globally.” 

The project addresses four major challenges identified in current religion and spirituality competency efforts:

1. religiosity gaps between practitioners and clients who may not share the same beliefs;
2. research gaps in understanding the mechanisms by which religion and spirituality involvement influence health outcomes, for good and for ill;
3. psychosocial gaps created when religion and spirituality are treated as individualized experiences, in ways that exclude a patient’s household, kinship, and social networks
4. diversity gaps, since many existing tools are rooted in Western contexts and do not reflect global and comparative religious experience.

To build a more inclusive and globally adaptable training model, Ethnos-MH will be piloted at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; CAMHRA/SOAS, University of London, and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi. These three leading institutions bring together a wide range of disciplines, allowing the program to be tested and refined across different professional environments.

"I extend my sincere congratulations to Professors Bagaria and Singh on this important achievement," said David F. Holland, Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at HDS. "Ethnos-MH represents the kind of innovative, interdisciplinary work that advances our scholarly insight into the complex interplay of mental health practices and the religiously informed perspectives of both providers and patients. The new knowledge gained through this project will also directly enrich our students’ classroom and fieldwork experiences, equipping them to engage these therapeutic intersections more responsibly, whether as participants or as scholarly observers."

The initiative includes two major components. The first, “Ethnos-MH Basic,” is a knowledge-based program that introduces broad cohorts of participants to core ethnographic concepts and methods. Through eight structured modules, trainees will learn methods to understand topics such as illness narratives and the varying intensities and tempos of religious experience; ritual and coping strategies; non-pathologized understanding of phenomena such as hearing voices; influences of household, kin and neighborhood dynamics; ontologically diverse knowledge systems; and self-reflection within clinical practice.

The second component, “Ethnos-MH Advanced,” is a skill-based field research program that includes a smaller group from each country selected to conduct a mini-ethnography on religion and psychological wellbeing in a range of clinical and non-clinical sites in the three regions. Guided by postdoctoral mentors and project leaders, participants will produce research on their chosen field sites, grounded in anthropological insights and ethnographic methods.

Ethnos-MH will provide mental health practitioners with new ways to recognize and engage the religious and spiritual dimensions of experiences of illness and recovery. The program ultimately seeks to bridge gaps across socio-economic, religious, and cultural divides between patients and mental health practitioners in different parts of the world.

Banner image: HDS Professor Swayam Bagaria and University of London's Bhrigupati Singh