OBJECTIVE To understand the meanings of spirituality from the perspective of patients with mental disorders. METHOD Qualitative phenomenological research conducted with nine users of a centre for psychosocial care in a city in the interior of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in February 2014. RESULTS Two units of meaning emerged from the comprehensive analysis: Spirituality is a therapeutic support fo...

BACKGROUND The connection between religion/spirituality and deviance, like substance abuse, was first made by Durkheim who defined socially expected behaviors as norms. He explained that deviance is due in large part to their absence (called anomie), and concluded that spirituality lowers deviance by preserving norms and social bonds. Impairments in brain reward circuitry, as observed in Reward...

The oxytocin (OT) system, critically involved in social bonding, may also impinge on spirituality, which is the belief in a meaningful life imbued with a sense of connection to a Higher Power and/or the world. Midlife male participants (N = 83) were randomly assigned to receive intranasal OT or placebo. In exploratory analyses, participants were also genotyped for polymorphisms in two genes cri...

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Meanings of religious and nonreligious spirituality are explored, with implications for death acceptance, death rejection, and life extension. In the first of two exploratory studies, 16 elders low on intrinsic religiosity were compared with 116 elders high in religiosity; they differed both in qualitative responses and on death attitudes. In the second, 48 elders were assessed on religious and...

The purpose of the present study was to explore nurses' perception about spirituality and spiritual care. A qualitative content analysis approach was conducted on 20 registered nurses interviewed using unstructured strategy in 2009. Three themes emerged from the data analysis: 1) "meaning and purpose of work and life" including 'spiritualistic view to profession', 'commitment and professional r...

Health-related studies of spirituality are threatened by the lack of conceptual distinctions between religion and spirituality, the use of small, nongeneralizable samples, and by measurement error in many instruments that unreliably and invalidly capture this domain. The authors review the construct and validity evidence for the Spirituality Index of Well-Being (SIWB), an instrument designed to...

The aim of the current article is to review the literature on religion and spirituality as it pertains to adolescent psychiatric symptoms. One hundred and fifteen articles were reviewed that examined relationships between religion/spirituality and adolescent substance use, delinquency, depression, suicidality, and anxiety. Ninety-two percent of articles reviewed found at least one significant (...

Nursing programs have done a commendable job keeping pace with the rapid advances in disease management. Yet, spirituality has received far less attention in nursing curricula (Keefe, 2005) and nursing students often do not have a strong foundation in this area. The purpose of this project was to integrate spirituality into the undergraduate nursing curricula and measure student outcomes relate...