Spirituality and Mental Health

Learn to conduct a client-centered assessment of spirituality—and use the findings to enhance your interventions as well as your clients'' psychospiritual coping abilities

Even to clinicians practiced in helping clients to manage their stress, the impact of clients’ spirituality upon their mental health can be difficult to discern and discuss. Moreover, ethical dilemmas can arise when clinicians feel compelled to intervene with a client’s negative religious coping.

Spirituality and Mental Health: Clinical Applications can help. This thought-provoking guide for mental health professionals and pastoral counselors provides you with a framework to assess and incorporate client-based spirituality into your practice. The author provides case
examples and clinical models related to spirituality and mental health, as well as useful questionnaires for assessing clients. He provides a client-centered ethical framework for integrating spirituality into treatment, and then discusses how to apply it to clients’ problems, especially those related to life crises, resentment over past offenses, guilt over past mistakes, and
substance abuse. He also discusses how mindfulness meditation can enhance clients’ coping ability. Finally, he includes a useful Leader’s Guide for the psychoeducational spirituality group, which is designed to educate patients and church groups.

Spirituality and Mental Health: Clinical Applications shows how professionals in the above disciplines can address the impact of spirituality on clients by:

• gaining an understanding of the construct of spirituality
  
• assessing spirituality and its interface with clients’ presenting problems, particularly when spirituality is central to their values.
  
• intervening sensitively in ways that use clients’ spiritual perspectives and practices to enhance their coping mechanisms.
  
• using the included Leader’s Guide to the 5-session psychoeducational spirituality group