OBJECTIVE Research into risk and protective factors for psychiatric disorders may help reduce the burden of these conditions. Spirituality and religion are 2 such factors, but research remains limited. Using a representative national sample of respondents, this study examines the relation between worship frequency and the importance of spiritual values and DSM-IV psychiatric and substance use d...

Recently, quality of life studies among patients with HIV/AIDS have shown high levels of life satisfaction. Spiritual and religious factors may contribute to these positive outcomes. We interviewed 19 patients with HIV/AIDS in order to understand better the role of religious-spiritual biographies and orientations in quality of life, and found four patterns to describe the ways in which past exp...

Kamui yukar (chants of spiritual beings) are one among over twenty genres of Ainu oral performance. Highly rhythmical, kamui yukar are sung in the first person voice of the spiritual being whose story is told. Normally these spiritual beings are natural phenomena, usually animals. This article examines and translates the third kamui yukar, the Chant of the Fox About Itself recorded by Chiri Yuk...

Difficulties persist in conceptualising spiritual needs and understanding their relationship to religious needs and relevance to wellbeing. This review was undertaken to clarify some of these issues. It set out to establish what is already known about how issues of spiritual assessment and care are addressed in undergraduate nursing education. Using a systematic approach, a literature review co...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To measure the prevalence of spiritual needs and identify factors associated with spiritual needs among patients with cancer and family caregivers. DESIGN Descriptive, cross-sectional, quantitative. SETTING Inpatients and outpatients at a university medical center in the southwestern United States. SAMPLE 156 patients with cancer and 68 family caregivers who were primar...

Increasingly, social workers are being called on to conduct spiritual assessments, yet few assessment methods have appeared in academic literature. This article reviews five complementary assessment approaches that have recently been developed to highlight different facets of clients' spiritual lives. Specifically, one verbal model, spiritual histories, is discussed, along with four diagrammati...

The majority of patients treated for cancer will have pain at some point in their journey. Suffering and death are common events in cancer patients. Palliative care has been very successful in reducing the discomfort caused by physical pain, but does not have the means to address the questions related to the meaning of suffering and death. The soothing of physical pain has helped highlighting o...

Traumatic events may lead to dramatic changes in spirituality. The objective of this study was to explore whether posttraumatic spiritual transformation results not just from the traumatic event, but from spiritual experience during the crisis. The hypothesis tested was that survivors of a brush with death who had spiritual “near-death experiences” have greater spiritual growth and lesser spiri...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To investigate spiritual transformation among patients with cancer. DESIGN Longitudinal. SETTING A university medical center in the midwestern United States. SAMPLE 47 adult cancer survivors. METHODS Patients were asked about spirituality, religious and spiritual importance, religious coping, and spiritual gain and decline at baseline as well as nine months post-treat...