Spiritual Competence for Mental Health Professionals takes a holistic developmental approach toward spirituality in psychotherapy and counseling. This means that it considers an understanding of spiritual development to be as germane to mental health practice as an understanding of physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development and that it views spirituality as shaped by developmental processes. Common spiritual issues at each stage in the individual and family life course are discussed. Tools for understanding one's own and one's clients' spiritual orientations and goals along with interventions and practices that foster spiritual growth in the client and the practitioner are presented. Reflection and discussion topics are provided at the end of each chapter. Ultimately, this book aims to help mental health practitioners, educators and students to change their approach from 'meet the client where they are spiritually' to 'meet the client where they are spiritually and help them develop further.'

Spirituality lies at the heart of many clients' core values, and helps shape their perception of themselves and the world around them. In this book, two clinical psychologists provide a much-needed, research-based road map to help professionals appropriately address their clients’ spiritual or religious beliefs in treatment sessions. More and more, it has become essential for mental health professionals to understand and competently navigate clients' religious and spiritual beliefs in treatment. In Spiritual and Religious Competencies in Clinical Practice, you’ll find sixteen research-based guidelines and best practices to help you provide effective therapy while being conscious of your clients' unique spiritual or cultural background. With this professional resource as your guide, you will be prepared to: Take a spiritual and religious history when treating a client Attend to spiritual or religious topics in a clinical setting Hold clear ethical boundaries regarding your own religious or spiritual beliefs Know when and how to make referrals if topics emerge which are beyond the scope of your competence This book is a must-read for any mental health professional looking to develop spiritual, religious, and cultural competencies.

This book will be of tremendous use to all healthcare professionals from physicians to nurses to social workers, rehabilitation therapists, and chaplains. The pathway taken here is a sensible and reasonable one, emphasizing a patient-centred approach that underscores the importance of spiritually competent care. The Editors do an excellent job of describing how to integrate spirituality into patient care for all of the different healthcare professionals. They also emphasize the importance of an evidence-based approach that is guided by research. This book provides superb guidelines that will be enormously helpful to every healthcare professional. Harold G Koenig, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina This practical guide tackles the important issues of spirituality in health care, emphasising the role of organisations in developing a culture of leadership and management that facilitates spiritual care. Spirituality is a central part of holistic care that addresses physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of care in an integrated way. The chapters are written by experts in their fields, pitched at the practitioner level rather than addressing ‘spirituality’ as a purely theoretical concept. Each one describes the realities of spiritually competent practice and show how it can be taught and put into practice in a variety of areas and settings, including Undergraduate and Postgraduate education Acute healthcare settings Mental health Primary care End of Life Care Creative organisations Social services Ideal for practitioners, educators, trainees and managers in nursing and healthcare, the book is also relevant reading for occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social workers and psychologists.

Fukuyama and Sevig have compiled a significant volume that underscores the importance of counselors addressing clients′ spiritual values and experiences in the context of providing culturally-competent services. . . .One of the primary strengths of this book is that it is reader-friendly as the authors are quite skillful in blending scholarly and personal perspectives throughout. I would highly recommend this book to counselors, supervisors, academicians, researchers, and students who wish to expand their understanding of the impact of spiritual issues in the lives of culturally-diverse clients.- -Madonna G. Constantine, Columbia University "Finally! A book that examines the interface between spirituality and multiculturalism. Mary Fukuyama and Todd Sevig have created a timely masterpiece that provides a holistic view of multiculturalism, one that integrates spirituality into its fabric. The authors appropriately cover less known spiritual paths, such as Native American and Afrocentric perspectives. The chapter on developmental models of the spiritual journey is especially useful to counselors and other helping professionals. The authors also tackle the challenging question of positive and negative expressions of spirituality. The self awareness questions in each chapter prompt readers to examine their own spiritual and multicultural experiences and beliefs. Numerous case examples stimulate helping professionals to grapple with realistic and multifaceted issues that their client′s face. The integration of materials from diverse spiritual and multicultural perspectives makes this book a unique reference for anyone who is interested in this topic. As Fukuyama and Sevig note, spirituality is highly subjective and dynamic; their goal is to identify and explore good questions rather than propose definitive answers, The authors have succeeded in their goal. I highly recommend their book to counselors and all helping professionals; for all counseling is multicultural, and spirituality is an essential component of the human experience." —Pamela Highlen, Ohio State University In today′s world, multicultural contact and the search for meaning go hand in hand. This book provides an overview of spiritual and multicultural processes that will challenge and energize professionals who desire to engage in the complexities of the postmodern world. The authors propose that integrating spiritual values into multicultural learning and exploring spirituality from multicultural perspectives are synergistic and mutually reciprocal processes. Chapter topics include understanding multicultural worldviews and developmental models of the spiritual journey, integrating spiritual and multicultural competencies, clarifying healthy and unhealthy expressions of spirituality, exploring spiritual issues expressed through pain and loss as well as needs for power and creativity. Understanding counseling process issues including ethical concerns, and integrating spiritual interventions into one′s own counseling style.

Contemporary research supports the importance of spirituality for mental health. Counselors, social workers, psychologists and other therapists wonder how to include spirituality in treatment. Mental health training and current treatment models do not equip clinicians to adequately address the topic of spirituality. The Integrated Self presents a model for identifying and assessing spirituality within the client’s own life and experience. By operationally defining spirituality as a dimension of the client’s experience, The Integrated Self explores the role of culture, values, beliefs, and lifestyle for understanding the spiritual dimension of the person. Using case studies, clinicians learn how to implement the model of the integrated self within their existing theoretical orientation. The Integrated Self also includes discussions on the approaches for spiritual assessment and ethical issues related incorporating spirituality in mental health treatment. While other books focus on religious beliefs, spiritual practices, or formulations of a general kind of spirituality, The Integrated Self provides a model for a holistic approach that can be adapted in both mental health and health care settings.

Spirituality and culture are both recognized as important elements for providing culturally competent mental health services to ethnically and religiously diverse populations. They rarely, however, are considered together within a common conceptual framework. In this chapter, relationships between religiousness, spirituality, acculturation, and theological understandings of inculturation (e.g., how religious/spiritual beliefs and practices cannot be understood apart from their cultural context) are explored. Empirical evidence regarding the influence of religion and spirituality on mental health, as well as the effectiveness of spiritually and culturally accommodative approaches to treatment is also examined. Finally, the impact of spirituality and culture on mental health interventions is considered within two different paradigms: (a) how psychotherapy may be adapted to be more culturally sensitive to diverse populations, and (b) how indigenous notions of well-being, illness, and healing may help mental health providers broaden their notions of interventions.

Stay up-to-date in health care ministry as cultural and spiritual heterogeneity increases! Ministry in the Spiritual and Cultural Diversity in Health Care: Increasing the Competency of Chaplains identifies concrete methods for improving the provision of pastoral care to culturally and religiously diverse patients and/or residents. Experts from both inside and outside the profession—with established records in cross-cultural work and experience with religious diversity—discuss in detail the multicultural revolution that has challenged the traditional health care delivery system. With this timely resource, you will be able to respond to the requests and desires of patients and their loved ones with compassion and consideration for their cultural and spiritual backgrounds. Ministry in the Spiritual and Cultural Diversity in Health Care explores the challenges for the spiritual care professional in health care to address the emotional, cultural, and spiritual needs of a patient without assumption, bias, or discomfort for either person. In addition to advice, recommendations, and real-world examples and case studies, this valuable resource provides a guide for chaplaincy supervisors to use when training chaplain students to impart such unprejudiced care. The book is devoted to establishing chaplains who are clinically trained and certified to contribute to the increasingly pluralistic and global health care context with assorted religious, spiritual, and cultural values, beliefs, and practices. Ministry in the Spiritual and Cultural Diversity in Health Care will keep you updated on: how a health care chaplain can overlook the differing worldview of a patient and his or her family how cultural diversity impacts the work of the health care chaplain specific strategies and tools that will assist chaplains in acquiring spiritual and cultural competency definitions, obstacles, and standards of care for fostering a genuine multicultural perspective among health care givers, particularly chaplains how professional health care chaplains take leadership in responding to cultural and spiritual diversity within health care environments