Addressing Spirituality and Religion in Mental Health Graduate Coursework: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Faculty Infusion Strategies in the United States

Accreditation and ethical standards across the professions of counseling, marriage and family therapy (MFT), psychology, and social work include spirituality and/or religion (S/R) as core areas of multicultural diversity that will ideally be addressed in training and clinical practice. However, many graduate programs face logistic challenges for equipping students with basic attitudes, knowledge, and skills to attend to patients' S/R. The purpose of this study was to explore strategies for infusing content related to spiritual and religious competencies into mental health graduate coursework in an interdisciplinary sample of 1173 full-time faculty (response rate = 17%) from across the USA (e.g., S/R assessment, self-awareness about S/R background, knowledge about S/R as a source of strength or struggle). Overall, roughly 90% of the faculty respondents had addressed one or more facets of S/R competence in their primary course or content area over the prior year. In 60-70% of these cases, faculty addressed S/R in certain assignments/discussions rather than teaching content related to spiritual/religious aspects of wellness and functioning throughout an entire course. Additional analyses revealed psychology faculty were generally less likely to teach about S/R than counterparts from the other disciplines and participants with salient spiritual identities were especially likely to teach varying facets of S/R competence. In combination, findings indicate innovative approaches on the part of many graduate faculty across the major disciplines in the USA to prepare students to attend to spiritual and religious identities of the people they will encounter over their professional careers.