Page 189 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

158 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

and interview material. The chapter’s synthesis will involve methods and
support for applying spiritual care techniques in ways that offer healing in
diverse domains of health. “Appropriateness” will be discussed by main-
taining that there is a cost–benefit determination that takes into account
psychosocial benefits at the lowest cost (including cultural costs) to the
disaster-affected society. The chapter will end on its message that collab-
orations happen best within democratic and symmetric relationships of
stakeholders innovating optimal interventions.
From a category standpoint, spiritual care techniques are among the
many ethnomedical techniques within the larger domain of integrative
medicine* that, when blended with the domains of public health and
group psychology, make up integrative psychosocial resilience (IPR)
(Figure 12.1).
IPR brackets our attention on healing the psychosocial wounds of
disaster (and excludes other important relief functions, such as food,
water, sanitation, disease prevention, structural repair, communi-
cations, and security). The designation ethnomedical incorporates
the view that all healing practices are configured by the context in
which they were created and the context in which they are currently

Integrative
Psychosocial Public Ethnomedical
Resilience Health Competence

EC
IPR
Group Integrative
Psychology Medicine

Set of all
Ethnomedical
Techniques
(including
Spiritual Care)

Figure 12.1 Model of integrative psychosocial resilence

* Integrative medicine: A set of all empirically efficacious ethnomedical techniques for healing

and curing human suffering. It includes spiritual care, traditional medical systems, and allopathy
(modern biomedicine). Modern psychiatry with its pharmaceutical methods and psychotherapy
methods is viewed as one subset of ethnomedical techniques among many others.