Patient spirituality, a once disregarded dimension, is emerging in research and clinical care as a relevant factor in mental health. Internationally, psychiatry's professional associations have highlighted the need for developing sensitivity to this life dimension. A growing number of U.S. psychiatric residencies now include training on how to address patient spirituality in clinical care. Quan...

There has been a growing recognition of the need to understand the role of spirituality in ethnically diverse populations in social work and other helping professions. Although researchers are increasingly examining ethnic variations in prevalence rates, treatment utilization, and treatment outcomes for individuals with substance abuse problems, limited research attention has been focused on th...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To explore the nature of spiritual care in patients with cancer and discuss the Moral Authority, Vocational, Aesthetic, Social, and Transcendent (Mor-VAST) Model, a new theoretical model for assessment. DATA SOURCES Published articles, online references. DATA SYNTHESIS Discussions regarding spirituality often do not occur for a variety of reasons but may affect physical a...

A growing body of research suggests that mindfulness-based therapies may be effective in treating a variety of disorders including stress, chronic pain, depression and anxiety. However, there are few valid and reliable measures of mindfulness. Furthermore, mindfulness is often thought to be related to spirituality, given its roots in Buddhist tradition, but empirical studies on this relationshi...

American Indians exhibit suicide-related behaviors at rates much higher than the general population. This study examines the relation of spirituality to the lifetime prevalence of attempted suicide in a probability sample of American Indians. Data were derived from a cross-sectional sample of 1456 American Indian tribal members (age range 15-57yr) who were living on or near their Northern Plain...

The authors review Eastern and Western conceptions of spirituality, explicate the spirituality construct and differentiate it from religiosity, propose strategies for achieving ecumenicity and transcultural applicability, and suggest innovative techniques for measuring spirituality and spiritual emptiness. The essential attributes of ecumenical spirituality are that it (a) is concerned with exi...

There is a multitude of instruments for measuring religiosity/spirituality. Many of these questionnaires are used or even were developed in the context of studies about the connection between religiosity/spirituality and health. Thus, it seems crucial to note that measures can focus on quite different components along a hypothetical path between stressors and health. We present an instructive m...

AIM The concept of spirituality is much discussed in the UK nursing literature, despite the fact that Britain is one of the most secular countries in the world, and steadily becoming more so. Here, I pose the following question: given this increasing secularization, what accounts for the current interest in spirituality among UK nurses? BACKGROUND The literature on spirituality in nursing has...

While the field of empirical study on religion and spirituality in relation to mental health has rapidly expanded over the past decade, little is known about underlying dimensions of spirituality cross-culturally conceived. We aimed to bridge this gap by inductively deriving potential universal dimensions of spirituality through a large-scale, multi-national data collection, and examining the r...

UNLABELLED Introduction : Work over preparation of DSM-5 has been a stimulus for research and reflection over the impact of religious/spiritual factors on phenomenology, differential diagnosis, course, outcome and prognosis of mental disorders. AIM The aim of this paper is to present the attitude of DSM towards religion and spirituality in the clinical context. Even though DSM is not in use i...