The Use of Spiritually Integrated Interventions Among Bahá’í Mental Health Practitioners

Overview: The Bahá’í mental health practitioners explored participants’ use of spiritually integrated interventions and their beliefs about these interventions as appropriate or inappropriate for mental health practice. Their responses to the RSPBQ Index of 29 interventions showed “often” to “very often” utilization of spiritually integrated interventions in their mostly private practices.Proposal text: Spiritually interventions according to Hodge (2006a, p. 157) are defined as “ therapeutic strategies that incorporate a spiritual or religious dimension as a central component of the intervention”. Guidelines are being developed to assist practitioners when they use these interventions in an ethical manner (Hodge, 2011). There is a dearth of studies on the use of spiritually integrated interventions. A handful of research has addressed the needs of specific clientele populations including veterans exposed to trauma ( 2011), adults with mental illness (2019), and acute psychiatric patients (2015). Studies have shown that professionals need to address the spiritual needs of patients and families, making spirituality an integral area of a holistic approach to healthcare (Hughes, Carbonell, et al, 2018). To facilitate this spiritual integration, a set of behaviors by mental health practitioners may provide a trajectory for enhancing the bio-psychosocial and spiritual well-being of the client who prefers spiritually integrated interventions. Practice behaviors in the form of interventions are a critical area for the incorporation of spiritual elements. Utilizing online survey research, this first convenience sample (Nf105) study of Bahá’í mental health practitioners explored participants’ use of spiritually integrated interventions and their beliefs about these interventions as appropriate or inappropriate for mental health practice. The use of religious or spiritual interventions was measured by the practitioners’ frequency of utilization of spiritual behaviors in their practice. The Religious/Spiritual Psychotherapy Behaviors Questionnaire, or RSPBQ, is a 29-item survey developed by Frazier and Hansen (2009) specifically for the study of professional psychologists who were interested in addressing the spiritual and religious issues in psychotherapy. With permission from the first authors, this study used the 29-item RSPBQ. All 29 items in the RSPBQ pay particular attention to psychotherapy-related behaviors, not attitudes or knowledge. The RSPBQ uses a 5-point Likert scale, from 5 (very often) to 1 (never), to rate how often the professionals engaged in the stated behavior when working with their clients who seek spiritually integrated interventions based on a stratified sample of APA doctoral members professional psychologists and how important each behavior is. Results of this study indicate that Bahá’í mental health practitioners’ responses to the RSPBQ Index of 29 interventions showed “often” to “very often” utilization of spiritually integrated interventions in contrast with Frazier and Hansen’s (2009) original survey of professional psychologists indicating “infrequent” responses to the same index. They indicate a willingness to use some evidence-based spiritually integrated interventions in their mostly private practices. This study is one area of study incorporated in a dissertation that was submitted to the University of Pennsylvania School of Policy and Practice