What do psychiatrists need to learn? Knowledge, skills and attitudes

Abstract

In every culture and through history, religion has always being important, it is considered to play an adaptative role, that may help different societies to satisfied one or some human universal necessities. Therefore, according to psychological point of view, the more common aspect of religion in universality.

Religion and spirituality are very important for some people, it helps them to find life sense, in this aspect and not in other, we can clonclude that religion and spirituality are part of the quality of life. The World Health Organization (WHO) support that spiritual values or spirituality are an important component in quality of life.

Very often religious experience has not been taken into consideration by psychiatrist. It is not surprising that there are very few research studies and publications that help psychiatrist to explore religiosity in their patients. Many data suggest that religion in particular, or sipirituality in general (considered as an intimate and personal experience that not include rituals of any religion) is associated with increased sense of well-being, decreased depressive symptoms and is related with lifestyle behaviors’ (enhance positive coping strategies against stressful life events) and provide larger and stronger social networks.

Psychiatrists are trained in interviewing and they are aware of the domains that should be assessed: history of the present illness, diagnostic criteria, family history , formal mental status, social history, ….but even though we know spirituality is sometimes essential for patients, psychiatrist in general find more difficult and intimate to talk about one´s religions or spiritual life than one´s sexual experience.

In this paper we review questionaires that measure religiosity, spiritual well-being, religious coping strategies and beliefs and could help psychiatrist in taking spiritual history.

Spiritual matters and religion should become part of clinical psychiatric assessment, we have to take into consideration cultural beliefs, values that are important for patients and therefore spiritual concerns should be considered as a part of the patient-center medicine.

Therefore psychiatrists need to take into consideration the role of religion and spirituality in the diagnosis, symptoms, dyshabilities and resilience.