The use of spiritually integrated psychotherapies in mental health treatment centers

ABSTRACT

Practice-based evidence research was used to document the use of spiritual interventions in three mental health treatment settings among eight therapists and 128 clients. Materials included measures of client distress, along with measures of counselor’s therapeutic process use and orientations toward the delivery of spiritual interventions. Analyses revealed the most common theoretical approaches and spiritual interventions in our settings. Differences emerged in cross-site comparisons of therapeutic processes, as well as in spiritual intervention use with clients of different genders. This study contributes insight into what is being done in real-world settings to address spirituality into psychotherapeutic interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Spirituality
• religion
• counseling
• mental health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There was an interest in examining differences in therapists’ choices of theoretical approach and spiritual interventions according to age and race/ethnicity as well. However, given our small sample size of therapists and significant differences in both client age (Groups: 1: < 25, 2: 26–45, 3: >45; χ2 (n,4) = 27.097, p <.001) and client race/ethnicity (Groups: 1:African American, 2: Latino/Hispanic, 3: Caucasian; χ2 (n,4) = 82.990, p < .001) between study sites, we determined that differences existing along these dimensions would be reflective of site and therapist differences rather than actual differences in therapeutic process by age or race/ethnicity.

Additional information

Funding

The reported work was completed as part of the Bringing Integrated Psychotherapies into the Health Care Mainstream grant competition, led by the Bridges Consortium at Brigham Young University and funded by the John Templeton Foundation [Subaward #18-0503].