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A primer on spirituality and mental health.

“…However, as noted earlier, historically mental health professionals have held a less positive view of spirituality and religion, underscoring the importance and potential value of attending to the spiritual needs and issues of their clients. This perspective often resulted in a skewed and narrow case conceptualization of the presenting problem and may have led to inadequate treatment planning, as powerful sources of gain were largely overlooked (e.g., Gerson, Rhianon, Gold, & Kose, 2000). Although more mental health professionals are becoming more accepting of spirituality, there are those who still think that spirituality should not be addressed in psychotherapy.…”

“…Examples of documented reasons for opposition include (a) fear of imposing personal values; (b) bias or negative attitudes toward religion; (c) lack of theoretical model and training; (d) trained to minimize or disregard the importance of spirituality in the lives of their clients; and (e) view ofthe spiritual as outside of their scope of practice, reserving such dialogue for clergy (e.g., Miller & Thoresen, 2003). Studies have also shown that mental health professionals tend to view spiritual clients more pessimistically than nonspiritual clients, such as overpathologizing spiritual clients or feeling less equipped to work with spiritual clients (e.g., Gerson et al, 2000;Tucker et al, 2002). Notwithstanding these findings, a great deal of progress has been made, as there has been an increased interest and acceptance of spirituality by a substantial number of mental health professionals over the last 25 years (Benes, Walsh, McMinn, Domingues, & Aikins, 2000).…”

Clinical judgment faith bias: Unexpected findings for psychology research and practice.

“…Some research suggests that clinical judgment faith bias may be due to the religion of the clinician. Highly religious clinicians sometimes rate religious clients as having better prognoses (Hillowe, 1985), having more optimistic outcomes (Gerson, Allen, Gold, & Kose, 2000; Jones, 1991), and making more internal attributions (Houts & Graham, 1986) than nonreligious clients, while nonreligious clinicians do not do these things. Similarly, some research suggests that spiritual people have more optimistic expectations for various outcomes (Harris, Randolph, & Gordon, 2016; Hirsch, Nsamenang, Chang, & Kaslow, 2014); for example, having greater and more positive expectations for counseling (Godwin & Crouch, 1989; Koss, 1987) and rating counselors as more expert and trustworthy (Cashwell, Young, Cashwell, & Belaire, 2001).…”