Opportunities for collaboration
In collaboration with religious leaders, psychiatrists can actively support the mental health of spiritually and religiously minded patients through several low-effort, but potentially high-yield, initiatives. Notably, many of my suggested interventions do not require significant, if any, infrastructural changes to the health care system or worship communities. As psychiatrists, we can collaborate with faith leaders as follows:
1. More regularly assess the role of religion and spirituality in our patients’ daily lives to better meet their spiritual and mental health needs.
2. Better use existing chaplain services to provide spiritual support for hospitalized patients.
3. Present information about mental health – in-person, virtually, or in written form – to religious communities through talks, discussions, popular religious publications, social media platforms, and webinars.
4. Amplify existing mental health guides for faith leaders (i.e., the American Psychiatric Association’s guidebook Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders),8 thereby encouraging church leaders and staff to become better informed about common mental health conditions.
5. Collaborate with places of worship to offer psychiatric and psychological services to their members.
Dr. Atasha Jordan
This sort of engagement with religious communities is the collective role of community-oriented psychiatrists, not just psychiatrists who ascribe to religious or spiritual beliefs. We ought to remain mindful of the spiritual distress that many spiritual and religious patients feel when they experience mental illness,9 particularly in light of the distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic.10 But first, we must become comfortable with asking our patients about their religious or spiritual affiliations using tools such as the Cultural Formulation Interview.11 The more we recognize the role of spirituality in our patients’ lives, the better equipped we become to help patients identify and seek treatment for mental illness without the distress of their feeling spiritually deficient.
Dr. Jordan is a psychiatry resident physician in Philadelphia. She has no conflicts of interest.
References
1. Religious Landscape Study. pewforum.org.
2. U.S. Religion Census Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study. Association of Religion Data Archives. 2010. doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/9AMDJ.
3. J Med Ethics Hist Med. 2018 Apr 9;11:3.
4. The Dimensions of Health: Conceptual Models. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones & Bartlett, 2010.
5. J Res Christ Educ. 2014;23(2):176-86.
6. Health Serv Res. 2003 Apr;38(2):647-73.
7. “More Americans say they’re spiritual but not religious.” pewresearch.org. 2017 Sep 6.
8. Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Foundation, 2018.
9. Mental Health by the Numbers. NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. 2019.
10. “Most Americans say coronavirus outbreak has impacted their lives. Pew Research Center. pewsocialtrends.org. 2020 Mar 30.
11. DSM-5 Handbook on the Cultural Formulation Interview. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016.