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We have better antidepressants, more therapists, and a deeper understanding of brain chemistry than ever before. Yet suicide rates are climbing, overdose deaths are shattering records, and despair feels increasingly widespread.
What if the problem isn’t that our medicine has failed but that we are treating the wrong things?
When Spiritual Participation Declines, Mortality Rises
A recent peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) examined long-term trends in religious participation and mortality across the United States and found that states with the most significant declines in church attendance between 1985 and 2000 experienced significantly greater increases in so-called “deaths of despair,” including suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease.
Jingduan Yang
M.D.
Dr. Jingduan Yang is a board-certified psychiatrist and fifth-generation classical Chinese medicine physician whose work bridges Western psychiatry, functional medicine, and ancient healing traditions. He is the creator of the ACES Model of Health and Medicine—a four-dimensional framework spanning anatomy, chemistry, energy, and spirit—and the author of “Facing East” and “Clinical Acupuncture and Ancient Chinese Medicine.” As a principal founder of the Northern School of Medicine and Health Sciences, he advances whole-person care grounded in science, ethics, and humanity.
