Page 156 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

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on Reentering the Chapel

Models for Collaborations Between
Psychiatrists, Communities of Faith, and Faith-
Based Providers After Hurricane Katrina
Rebecca P. Smith, Julie Taylor, Gregory Luke Larkin,
Carol S. North, Diane Ryan, and Anastasia Holmes

Introduction

Given that religious and spiritual care providers historically have been the
main resource that individuals have turned to in the face of adversity or
disaster, it is perhaps surprising that psychiatric training does not routinely
provide instruction in the spiritual dimension of the human psychologi-
cal experience of healing or in models of collaboration with providers of
spiritual care. While progress has been made in psychiatry in explicitly
acknowledging religious and spiritual dimensions of psychological health
and mental health care, it has been slow.
It was only in 1994 that the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual included an explicit category that
can be used when a mental health professional is able to recognize and
acknowledge a religious or spiritual problem as the focus of their clini-
cal attention (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). This weakness
in psychiatric training places psychiatrists who wish to provide disaster
mental health care at a distinct disadvantage, denying us avenues for bet-
ter understanding the experiences of the disaster survivors we wish to
support and impeding our ability to collaborate effectively with leaders
in faith-based communities and colleagues with expertise in the provi-
sion of spiritual care. This is unfortunate because, given the incentives,

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