Eighteen years ago, Lisa Miller, now the director of clinical psychology at Columbia Universitys Teachers College, had an epiphany on a New York subway car. She had been poring over the mountains of data generated by a three-generation study of depressed women and their children and grandchildren. The biological trend was clear: Women with severeand particularly with recurrentdepression had daughters at equally high risk for the psychological disorder. At puberty, the risk was two to three times greater than for other girls. But the data seemed to show that the onset and, even more so, the incidence of recurring bouts with depression, varied widely.

Miller couldnt discern why. Raised in a close-knit Midwestern Jewish community, she had already looked for what she says psychologists rarely bothered to seekreligious belief and practiceand found some mild benefit for both mothers and children, but nothing that stood out among the other variants, such as socio-economic status. Then came the subway ride.

There I was, on a Sundayquite invested in this question, wasnt I, going up to the lab on a Sunday, recalls Miller in an interview. She was in a subway car crowded at one end and almost empty at the other, because that end was occupied by a dirty, dishevelled man brandishing a piece of chicken at everyone who boarded while yelling, Hey, do you want to sit with me? You want some of this chicken? The awkward scene continued for a few stops until an older woman and a girl of about eightgrandmother and granddaughter, Miller guessedgot on. The man bellowed his questions, and the pair nodded at one another and said, Thank you, in unison, and sat beside him. It astonished everyone in the car, including Miller and the man with the chicken, who grew quieter and more relaxed.

The childs evident character traitscompassion, acceptance, fearlessnessat so young an age prompted Millers eureka moment. What struck her was the nod and all it implied: It was clear as day that the grandchild fully understood how one lives out spiritual values in her family. Twenty minutes later, Miller was in her lab, running equations on the data that were, in effect, a search for the statistical nod. She was looking for mother-teen pairs who had reported a shared religion or non-religious spirituality. She calls the results the most amazing science I had ever seen. In the pairs Miller found in the data, shared spirituality (religious or otherwise)if it reached back to the childs formative yearswas 80 per cent protective in families that were otherwise at very high risk for depression.

It was the start of a long and sometimes rocky road for both Miller and the place of spiritualityhowever definedin mainstream psychological thinking. She remembers doors literally slammed in her face and people walking out of talks I was giving. But Miller and other researchers, including so-called spiritual neuroscientists like Montreals Mario Beauregard and the much-cited American psychologist Kenneth Kendler continued to explore the intersection of religiosity and mental health in studies published in major, peer-reviewed science journals. By the end of it, as Miller sets out in a provocative new book, The Spiritual Child, out later this spring, she was convinced not only of spiritualitys health benefits for people in general, but of its particular importance for young people during a stage of human development when we are most vulnerable to impulsive, risky or damaging behaviours.

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In fact, Miller declares, spirituality, if properly fostered in childrens formative years, will pay off in spades in adolescence. An intensely felt, transcendental sense of a relationship with God, the universe, nature or whatever the individual identifies as his or her higher power, she found, is more protective than any other factor against the big three adolescent dangers. Spiritually connected teens are, remarkably, 60 per cent less likely to suffer from depression than adolescents who are not spiritually oriented. tweet this Theyre 40 per cent less likely to abuse alcohol or other substances, and 80 per cent less likely to engage in unprotected sex. Spiritually oriented children, raised to not shy from hard questions or difficult situations, Miller points out, also tend to excel academically.

And teenagers can use all the help they can get. Recent research has revealed their neurological development to be as rapid and overwhelming as their bodily change. The adolescent brain is simultaneously gaining in intellectual power and losing in emotional control; its neural connectionsits basic wiringis a work in progress, with connections between impulse and second (or even first) thought slower than in adults. There is a surge in unfamiliar hormones and, as it turns out, a surge in spiritual longing.

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The science is in: God is the answer