Many spiritual caregivers, including chaplains, spiritual directors and clergy, are unaware of how they can support people with chronic health conditions. This book combines insights on chronic illness with spiritual care skills and suggestions to enhance well-being for people living with long-term illness. Using a narrative approach, the author reflects on the stories of two women - Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who travels from Kansas (a state of health) to Oz (an illness experience), alongside the author's personal experiences of managing an incurable autoimmune disease. Chapters will include guidelines and exercises that help equip caregivers to facilitate healing with people who live with long-term health conditions.

In the last fifteen years, the field of palliative care has experienced a surge in interest in spirituality as an important aspect of caring for seriously ill and dying patients. While spirituality has been generally recognized as an essential dimension of palliative care, uniformity of spiritual care practice has been lacking across health care settings due to factors like varying understandings and definitions of spirituality, lack of resources and practical tools, and limited professional education and training in spiritual care. In order to address these shortcomings, more than forty spiritual and palliative care experts gathered for a national conference to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. Their consensus findings form the basis of Making Health Care Whole. This important new resource provides much-needed definitions and charts a common language for addressing spiritual care across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, psychology, and other groups. It presents models of spiritual care that are broad and inclusive, and provides tools for screening, assessment, care planning, and interventions. This book also advocates a team approach to spiritual care, and specifies the roles of each professional on the team. Serving as both a scholarly review of the field as well as a practical resource with specific recommendations to improve spiritual care in clinical practice, Making Health Care Whole will benefit hospices and palliative care programs in hospitals, home care services, and long-term care services. It will also be a valuable addition to the curriculum at seminaries, schools of theology, and medical and nursing schools.

This book provides an alternative, complementary approach to the existing conventional approaches to religious and spiritually oriented coping. By focusing on the role of culture, the authors take into account the methods employed by a vast number of people who do not directly identify themselves as religious. The empirical data used in this book derive from studies conducted in several countries; Sweden, China, South Korea, Turkey and Malaysia, across which religion plays a different role in the social and cultural life of individuals. This approach and these empirical data are unique and allow comparisons to be made between different cultural settings. By introducing the concept of meaning-making coping, the authors explore the influence of culture on choice of coping methods, be they purely religious, spiritual or existential. The term "existential meaning-making coping" is used to describe coping methods that are related to existential questions; these methods include religious, spiritual and existential coping methods. Meaning-making Methods for Coping with Serious Illness contributes to new approaches and theoretical models of coping. As such it is an invaluable resource for health care, medical, public health and sociology students and researchers. It will also be of interest to educators and policy-makers working in the area of health.

This insightful work answers essential questions in family therapy by exploring the ethical use of religion and spirituality in the clinical context. Its justice-informed framework explores how to employ the spiritual as a source of resilience and empowerment as well as counter harmful spiritual and religious influences in situations that cause families and couples stress, particularly relating to gender, sexuality, race, culture, and identity. Powerful case studies show therapists and clients collaborating on meaning-making and comfort in the face of longstanding conflict, acute and chronic illness, estrangement, and loss. Coverage also explores the ethical responsibilities of determining whether beliefs are helpful or harmful to client mental health and offers guidelines for therapists navigating personal biases regarding faith. This vital text: · Spotlights the influence of an often-overlooked aspect of mental health · Provides detailed examples of religion and spirituality across diverse families and issues · Outlines practical strategies for integrating helpful aspects of clients’ relationship with the sacred into treatment · Offers a framework for countering harmful aspects of clients’ religious beliefs or practices · Includes interventions used with couples, parents/children, and other family units · Adds a socially just perspective on the spiritual dimension of mind/body concerns · Encourages readers’ professional development and self-reflection Addressing critical issues where belief frequently takes center stage, Socially Just Religious and Spiritual Interventions is an invaluable resource for family therapists, psychotherapists, and other professionals pursuing a socially just, clinically relevant approach to spiritual and religious therapeutic integration.

This book explores how people draw upon spiritual, religious, or faith-based practices to support their mental wellness amidst forms of chronicity. From diverse global contexts and spiritual perspectives, this volume critically examines several chronic conditions, such as psychosis, diabetes, depression, oppressive forces of colonization and social marginalization, attacks of spirit possession, or other forms of persistent mental duress. As an inter- and transdisciplinary collection, the chapters include innovative ethnographic observations and over 300 in-depth interviews with care providers and individuals living in chronicity, analyzed primarily from the phenomenological and hermeneutic meaning-making traditions. Overall, this book depicts a modern global era in which spiritualty and religion maintain an important role in many peoples’ lives, underscoring a need for increased awareness, intersectoral collaboration, and practical training for varied care providers. This book will be of interest to scholars of religion and health, the sociology and psychology of religion, medical and psychological anthropology, religious studies, and global health studies, as well as applied health and mental health professionals in psychology, social work, physical and occupational therapy, cultural psychiatry, public health, and medicine.

Fusing the disciplines of health care, spiritual care, and social services, this book examines the relationship between chronic illness and spirituality. Contributors include professionals working in traditional, holistic and integrative clinical settings, as well as religious studies scholars and spiritual practitioners.

Reconstructing Meaning After Trauma: Theory, Research, and Practice informs actual therapeutic work with clients who present with traumas or other life disruptions by providing clinicians with information on the construction of meaning. It includes material on diverse mechanisms of clinical change and positive-promoting processes. The book covers identifiable treatments and specific lines of research in assisting clients in developing new meaning, such as posttraumatic growth (after sexual assault, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, destructive natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, and refugee experiences), and finding benefit (in the context of loss—loss of health, or loss of a loved one). Addresses a specific treatment or line of research Includes extended case vignettes at the beginning of each chapter Describes the associated theoretical background for each method Summarizes the research supporting each mechanism Concludes with a discussion of future directions for treatment, research, and theory