Mental Health Without Religion: Peru’s First Humanist Psychotherapy Initiative

What does belonging mean when you don’t believe? In most of the world, spiritual communities provide networks of care — showing up for births, deaths, and existential crises. For the growing number of non-religious people, these institutional supports often don’t exist.

Fabrizio E. López De Pomar
Clinical psychologist and psychotherapy consultant based in Lima, Peru. Member of the Peruvian Association of Atheists (APERAT) and collaborator with Humanists International on mental health and secular support initiatives.

Peru exemplifies this gap: a predominantly Catholic nation where a rising secular population navigates life’s most vulnerable moments without communal scaffolding. The Peruvian Association of Atheists (APERAT), an affiliate of Humanists International, has launched Peru’s first humanist psychological counseling program — over 100 hours of free psychotherapy designed specifically for non-religious people and families.

What makes this significant is what science reveals: secular people are not psychologically fragile. A 2018 study by Baker and colleagues found that atheists report better physical and mental health than many religious groups, with fewer symptoms of anxiety, paranoia, and obsessive thinking. The critical insight across multiple studies is simple but counterintuitive: what matters is not whether one’s worldview is religious or secular, but whether it is coherent. People with firm atheist identity — like committed believers — show better emotional stability than those with ambiguous or contradictory beliefs. Clarity protects. Uncertainty is the stressor.

This pattern repeats across the research: institutional belonging drives wellbeing more than doctrinal content. People who believe in God but don’t participate in religious communities show worse mental health outcomes than either committed believers or committed atheists. Secular people, meanwhile, tend to generate meaning actively — constructing purpose through relationships, creative work, and social contribution rather than inheriting it from tradition. This is not a deficit; it’s a source of genuine agency. The real challenges non-religious people face are social, not existential: stigma in religious societies, family tension, absence of ready-made rituals for grief. These are products of marginalization, not of secular identity itself.

What distinguishes APERAT’s approach is that it does not stop at therapy. Alongside counseling, they organized Peru’s first humanist community gathering — a virtual event designed for genuine human encounter. Why does this matter? Because institutional belonging, not isolated rationality, drives psychological wellbeing. Religious traditions understood this long ago: they bundled belief with community, ritual, and social identity. Humanist movements are learning to do the same. This is what contemporary humanism looks like: not abstract philosophy, but lived practice of care.

Research confirms that non-religious people are not existentially disadvantaged. With psychological, communal, and institutional support, secular people thrive — they generate meaning, live ethically, belong to communities, and navigate loss. The missing piece was infrastructure. APERAT is building that infrastructure. We are not defending secular ideas — we are enacting them. Listening, caring, creating space for people to flourish without faith but with dignity, community, and hope. This is what it means to make humanism real: not as abstraction, but as practice of compassion.