Across prisons, hospitals, and therapy institutions, common patterns emerge.
Identity Transformation: Whether it’s through religious transformation in prison, spiritual reframing in hospitals, or finding meaning in therapy, religion constantly supports identity reconstruction.
Emotion, Mental Health, and Meaning: Spirituality helps people cope with shame, guilt, trauma, or fear. A religious framework provides meaning in situations where living in an institution strips people of their personal autonomy.
Community and Belonging: Prison chaplains create communities inside systems of punishment. Hospital chaplains provide companionship for people who are suffering. Therapists can integrate clients’ spirituality into treatment plans.
Institutional Power: Institutions may encourage religion as a discipline tool (prisons), medicalize spiritual experiences (hospitals), or avoid spiritual issues due to a lack of training (therapy). Each setting shows tensions between agency versus control, belief versus diagnosis, and care versus coercion.
Gender, Race, and Colonialism: There is limited research on women’s prisons, African American spiritual experiences are frequently misdiagnosed as psychosis, and psychiatry has commonly treated non-Western religious practices as unusual or unhealthy.