Lack of professional training for addressing peoples’ spirituality and/or religion (S/R) in clinical practice is the most pressing and rectifiable cause of spiritually avoidant mental health care around the globe. This project will advance the global reach and downstream impacts of two evidence-informed training programs with demonstrated feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness for facilitating spiritually competent care in U.S. contexts: Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) and Spiritual Psychotherapy for Inpatient, Residential, and Intensive Treatment (SPIRIT).
Working closely with global partners, we will develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate culturally-adapted and publicly-accessible versions of SCT-MH and SPIRIT in their locales/settings throughout Asia, Europe, North and South America. Specifically, the SCT-MH team will conduct cultural adaptation trials in Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Spain, and Spanish-speaking contexts in the Caribbean and Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico) and the SPIRIT team will focus on Brazil and three countries in Western Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands).
We will train over 1,500 clinicians between these two sub-projects to incorporate S/R in their routine practice in ways that will help thousands of patients over the three-year project. In so doing, we will widely disseminate the training programs and establish a network of mental health leaders from the broader international community to address S/R in clinical training, research, and practice in their contexts over the long-term. In combination, achieving these aims will ultimately enhance human flourishing on a larger scale via increasing the number of clinicians in the global mental health workforce with foundational attitudes, knowledge, and skills to attend to spiritual and/or religious aspects of peoples’ suffering, healing, and transformation over their professional careers.
