Handbook of Spirituality and Worldview in Clinical Practice

by Allan M. Josephson MD (Editor), John R. Peteet MD (Editor)

Overview

This refreshing new work is a practical overview of religious and spiritual issues in psychiatric assessment and treatment. Eleven distinguished contributors assert that everyone has a worldview and that these religious and spiritual variables can be collaborative partners of science, bringing critical insight to assessment and healing to treatment.

Unlike other works in this field, which focus primarily on spiritual experience, this clearly written volume focuses on the cognitive aspects of belief -- and how personal worldview affects the behavior of both patient and clinician. Informative case vignettes and discussions illustrate how assessment, formulation, and treatment principles can be incorporated within different worldviews, including practical clinical information on major faith traditions and on atheist and agnostic worldviews.

The book's four main sections give concise yet comprehensive coverage of varying aspects of worldview: • Conceptual Foundation -- The Introduction explains the significance of worldview and its context in the development of psychiatry; reviews misunderstandings about spirituality and worldview and how they can be resolved in contemporary practice; and discusses Freud's significant influence on psychiatry's approach to religion and spirituality.• Clinical Foundations -- Three chapters review how clinicians can integrate spiritual and religious perspectives in the basic clinical processes of assessment (gathering a religious or spiritual history); diagnosis and case formulation (including religious and spiritual factors); and treatment (including a review of ethical issues).• Patients and Their Traditions -- Six chapters discuss Catholic and Protestant Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and secularists (atheists and agnostics), including a brief history, clinical implications of core beliefs, and variations of therapeutic encounters (both where patient and clinician share the same faith and where they do not) for each faith tradition.• Worldview and Culture -- A concluding chapter reviews issues of a global culture where faiths once rarely encountered in North America are increasingly seen in clinical practice.

This well-organized text sheds much-needed light on an area too often obscure to many clinicians, fostering a balanced integration of religion and spirituality in mental health training and practice. Bridging several disciplines in a novel way, this thought-provoking volume will find a diverse audience among mental health care students, educators, and professionals everywhere who seek to better integrate the religious and spiritual aspects of their patients' lives into assessment and treatment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781585626977
Publisher:	American Psychiatric Publishing, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/20/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Allan M. Josephson, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, Bingham Child Guidance Center, Professor and Chief, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Louisville School of Medicine, Louisville, Kentucky

John R. Peteet, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Clinical Director, Psychiatry, Adult Psychosocial Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Attending Psychiatrist, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

Table of Contents

ContributorsPrefacePART I: Conceptual FoundationChapter 1. Introduction: Definition and Significance of a WorldviewPART II: Clinical FoundationsChapter 2. Worldview in Psychiatric AssessmentChapter 3. Worldview in Diagnosis and Case FormulationChapter 4. Therapeutic Implications of WorldviewPART III: Patients and Their TraditionsChapter 5. Protestant ChristiansChapter 6. Catholic ChristiansChapter 7. JewsChapter 8. MuslimsChapter 9. Hindus and BuddhistsChapter 10. Atheists and AgnosticsPART IV: Worldview and CultureChapter 11. Worldview in Global PerspectiveIndex

What People are Saying About This

Francis G. Lu

Everyone, including patient and clinician, has a worldview, a philosophy of life, which affects the clinical encounter. This book provides a thoughtful and practical approach for clinicians and trainees to enhance the therapeutic alliance and understand transference-countertransference issues which arise when therapists and clinicians have either the same or different worldviews. In our increasingly multicultural society, this book is an essential roadmap for incorporating worldview and spirituality into our assessment and treatment planning, which will improve our quality of care.

Leigh C. Bishop

Clinical assessment of the patient's worldview is not for the careless or unprepared. In addition to humility, those who venture into the delicate and daunting forest of the patient's spiritual life need a guide. Josephson, Peteet, and their colleagues have provided such a guide in this finely balanced and clinically rich treatment.

Dan G. Blazer

Drs. Josephson and Peteet have assembled a collection of essays critical to the practice of psychiatry in a country that is becoming increasingly diverse in spiritual worldviews. Regardless of whether practitioners believe that spirituality plays a role in improving mental health (or aggravating mental illness), few can doubt that practitioners must understand the spiritual context out of which psychiatric symptoms emerge. Some attempts to address this spiritual context (or worldview) reduce spirituality to a construct that can be assessed generically, that is, one size fits all. The authors of these essays, in contrast, speak to the diversity of spiritual worldviews and the need for the psychiatrist to be familiar with this diversity. Though this volume takes a path less traveled, I believe it takes the correct path to achieve the editors' goal—'to understand the place of our own and our patients' worldviews in our clinical work.'

James L. Griffith

Psychiatrists have long needed a bridge that could connect their worlds of psychobiology and psychotherapy traditions with the spiritualities, religions, and political ideologies that ground the lives of so many of their patients. Handbook of Spirituality and Worldview in Clinical Practice helps clinicians move from the known to the unknown, from the familiar language of psychodynamic constructs and DSM-IV disorders to patients' religious beliefs and spiritual practices that can also promote therapeutic change. Its chapters provide guidance for assessing a patient's spirituality, as well as tutorials on the specific beliefs for Catholic and Protestant Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and atheists and agnostics.

Richard K. Harding

When the students are ready, the teacher will come. The psychiatric community is finally ready to examine carefully our individual and collective spiritual values. With this groundbreaking book, we will begin seeing our spiritual development as a protector rather than a risk factor for a healthy, creative mind.

Elizabeth S. Bowman

Drs. Josephson and Peteet bring clarity to a very rarely discussed topic: worldviews are the unacknowledged elephants in the consulting room, silently in the background, shaping every clinical encounter.

Editorial Reviews

5 Stars! from Doody

Reviewer: Patricia E. Murphy, PhD (Rush University Medical Center)
Description: This well-integrated book of chapters by different authors provides a solid framework with which to approach a client's spiritual worldview as well as specific information about believers of major religions in North America.
Purpose: Increasingly there is evidence of the relation of religious beliefs or practices to health. This book provides information on spirituality and the individual as a tool for clinicians who face the demand to appreciate and assess the perspectives of persons of diverse spiritual or religious worldviews.
Audience: Although its primary audience is clinicians, the book would serve as an excellent text for those in training.
Features: This book exceeds what you might find in a handbook. An opening chapter places Freud's approach to religion in the framework of the philosophical, scientific, and religious context of his time as well as in the context of Freud's inner dynamics, particularly in relation to his father. Material on spiritual assessment and case formulation incorporates some of the best current thinkers in the field. A thoughtful approach to ethical considerations of addressing spirituality in psychotherapy prepares the reader for chapters discussing beliefs of particular religious traditions and the impact these beliefs could have in clinical settings. The book also addresses the perspective of those who claim to be atheist. A concluding chapter stretches the reader to attend to perspectives of those from non-Western cultures.
Assessment: The clinician who only has limited time would do well to read this book. It does a masterful job of incorporating the best of current work on religion and spirituality in psychiatry. The authors provide balanced material that simply elucidates belief frameworks that might help or harm a client with little of the personal passion that can challenge the objectivity needed for this topic.

Doody's Review Service

The book is an important step in acknowledging the changing face of psychiatry in America. As psychiatrists (and, indeed, as human beings), we need occasional reminders to ask informed questions and then to listen to the answers. This book provides both the reminder and... the information.

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

This book could not have appeared ten years ago—it is a tribute to progress in the field of spirituality and health that it appears now.... The volume should enable clinicians to adopt a more sympathetic approach to their patients' worldviews, especially if they differ from their own, but a greater self-awareness on the part of the physician is no less important.

The Scientific and Medical Network Review