Religious Experience Within Mental Illness

Abstract

While conventional religious practice shows signs of decline, this does not necessarily imply a decline in religious belief. It comes as a surprise that psy chiatrists should be so reticent in their inquiry into this aspect of their patients' emotional and cognitive experience. Only 3% of a qualitative review of the total output of four major psychiatric journals between 1978-1982 contained a quantified religious variable, and only three out of 3777 articles scanned were centrally and quantitatively concerned with traditional religious phenomena (Larson et a!, 1986). This deficiency has attracted protest

Spirituality in psychiatry residency training programs

“…Crossley, following up on Sims in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1995, underscored both the clinical and research neglect of attending to religion and identified the steps that could be taken to address this neglect (Crossley, 1995). Despite these initial rumblings in the British journals mentioned here, we are not aware of training efforts that might begin to rectify the clinical and research oversights concerning patient spirituality.…”

Religion and Spirituality: How Clinicians in Quebec and Geneva Cope with the Issue When Faced with Patients Suffering from Chronic Psychosis

“…Their knowledge of their patients' religious activities and the importance of religion in patients' lives was inaccurate: patients' group religious practices were correctly identified in half the cases, whereas individual religious practices were identified for only one-third. The reasons given by the clinicians in Trois-Rivières are the same as those given in Geneva ) and in the literature (Neeleman and Persaud 1995;Greenberg and Witztum 1991;Shafranske 1996;Lukoff et al 1995;Crossley 1995): they believe they lack the skills necessary to evaluate this dimension; they are afraid of weakening or provoking a relapse in the patient (''open door to madness''); they lack the time to investigate this dimension or they believe that it is not their job to do so but that of an almoner, church worker or other spiritual counsellor. During the study, several strategies were put forward by Quebec clinicians who worked with some very religious patients on a daily basis: cooperating with the patient's spiritual mentor to reduce the patient's resistance, examining the therapist's own religious attitudes to modify counter-transference feelings and, for the majority of them, acquiring knowledge of the patient's religion to better distinguish religious beliefs from delusion or obsessivecompulsive symptoms when interviewing patients.…”

Religious Faith after Psychotic Illness

“…Religious beliefs in psychiatric patients are relatively neglected by psychiatrists and psychologists [1][2][3]. This might be partly due to the fact that they are less religiously oriented than their patients and the general population [4,5].…”