How Religion Can Benefit, Not Damage, Mental Health

During my first semester as a graduate student in 1981, I read an article by Brigham Young University professor Dr. Allen E. Bergin which included a challenging statement from Dr. Albert Ellis asserting that religion had a negative effect on mental health: "Religiosity is in many ways equivalent to irrational thinking and emotional disturbance. . . . The elegant therapeutic solution to emotional problems is to be quite unreligious [as] the less religious they are, the more emotionally healthy they will be."