Spiritual Needs in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

In recent years several position papers of relevant psychiatric associations have pled for the respectful attention and explicit integration of patients’ spiritualities and religiosities into the treatment process. How important are patients’ spiritual needs for psychiatric staff, and how spiritual do they consider themselves? How important are spiritual needs for inpatients in psychiatry and psychotherapy? How do patients feel treated with regard to their spiritual needs by staff, and how do the staff say they treat patients with regard to their spiritual needs? In two surveys, psychiatric staff all over Germany on the one hand and inpatients of a psychiatric ward of a university clinic on the other hand responded to questionnaires, including the SpNQ 1.2 with the inpatients. In all 401 psychiatric professionals and 248 inpatients gave us self-reports. First, there was no significant correlation between the staff’s intrinsic religiosity (DUREL) and their experience of how often their patients bring up religious and/or spiritual issues. Their intrinsic religiosity and their appraisal of the influences of patients’ religious/spiritual issues on therapeutic outcome, however, showed significant correlations. Second, among the inpatients, Inner Peace needs got the highest scores (2.04 ± 0.67), followed by Actively Giving/Generative needs (1.54 ± 0.91), Existentialistic needs (1.32 ± 0.77), and Religious Needs (0.75 ± 0.83). The scales of SpNQ 1.2 did not show any significant differences for sex, family status, education or diagnosis. The results show a considerable gap and contradictions between proclaimed practice and self-perception of psychiatric staff and the reported experience of inpatients who nevertheless were mostly satisfied with the way staff dealt with religious or spiritual issues. Exigencies for more adequate training of staff regarding spiritual needs and competences in clinical practice are discussed.