Article published January 17, 2009
In new book, BGSU professor urges recognition of spirituality's benefits
Kenneth Pargament, a BGSU psychology professor, has written two books on spirituality and mental health.
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THE BLADE/LORI KING
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By DAVID YONKE
BLADE RELIGION EDITOR
BOWLING GREEN - For more than 30 years, Kenneth Pargament has been studying the connection between religion and mental health. And for most of those three decades, the Bowling Green State University professor of clinical psychology has been like a voice crying in the wilderness.
In recent years, however, the professor has been encouraged by a growing awareness and acceptance among mental-health practitioners of the profound impact - both good and bad - that spirituality can have on patients.
"It's just exciting to see the field expand," Mr. Pargament said in an interview in his BGSU office this week. "I used to talk about how we used to whisper about religion in medical and psychological settings. Now we don't need to whisper. … We've come of age."
A graduate of the University of Maryland, where he received both his bachelor's and doctorate degrees, Mr. Pargament has been doing his part to equip health professionals with the tools needed to incorporate spirituality in their treatment of patients.
His latest book, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy: Understanding and Addressing the Sacred, released last year by Guilford Press, offers a broad range of clinical advice that includes spiritual awareness.
It follows Mr. Pargament's previous book, The Psychology of Religion and Coping, which reported his extensive research on how people turn to spirituality in times of stress."If you ask people what helps them the most in their most difficult times, many studies show that among the most common resources they list is religion and spirituality," he said. "For some groups, it's the most popular and important resource. For elders, African-Americans, people dealing with illness, religion can sometimes top the list. More than going to family and friends, more than going to a physician, more than all the other coping methods, religion is at the top. So why shouldn't we be helping people to access the resource that's most important to them?"
It's only been in the last few decades that this component of life has begun to be taken seriously by the mental health profession, he said.
Many of the pioneers of psychology were, in fact, biased against and even antagonistic toward religion and spirituality.
Sigmund Freud, he said for example, believed that religion was an immature and childlike way of grappling with fears and anxieties, that it was a "constricting" force.
Behaviorist pioneer B.F. Skinner taught that people's lives are shaped entirely by their environment.
Such psychological views are pessimistic, especially when health professionals are trying to get people to make changes in their lives, Mr. Pargament said.
This negative perception of religion and spirituality has permeated psychological training in the past, leading most counselors to avoid the topic when patients mention it, he said.
"Most programs in health and medicine in the past provided zero training for working with religious or spiritual lines with patients. No training at all," Mr. Pargament said. "So when issues would come up in practice, oftentimes practitioners would change the subject. They might refer to a clergy person. They just didn't know what to do with it."
Compounding the situation, psychologists themselves often placed little value on spirituality, which affected the way they treated their patients.
Mr. Pargament, who has been on the BGSU faculty since 1979 and also works as a clinical psychologist, said, for example, that only 25 percent of clinical psychologists say they believe in God, compared to 90 percent of the general public.
"In some ways, clinical psychologists and health professionals are generally atypical because as a group we may underestimate the importance of religion and spirituality and just assume that it's not that significant because we're not that religiously or spiritually involved," he said. "We project our own irreligiousness onto people we work with."
This has been shifting in recent years, however, as a variety of factors have helped health practitioners recognize the importance of spirituality.
For one, Mr. Pargament and a handful of other scholars in the field have conducted extensive research demonstrating that religion is a powerful force in people's lives.
"The research itself has convinced many skeptics that something's going on here," he said. "When you find that regular church attendance increases life expectancy on average seven years, OK, it's a well-established finding. For African-Americans, it's 14 years. … Once you begin to do quality research and show that religious beliefs and practices are in fact tied to health and well-being, well then you have to start looking further into it."
Also contributing to the new awareness of spirituality among health providers is the increased exposure to religious diversity in the United States in general, broadening Americans' understanding of religion and spirituality.
At the same time, the country's cultural emphasis on materialism has left many people feeling unfulfilled, he said.
"People recognize some of the limits of living a purely materialistic life and want to connect with something within themselves or greater than themselves that is somehow transcendent," he said. "So we year for some deeper dimension, deeper meaning to our lives. Practitioners and the general public, this is something we are just crying out for."
Today, many medical and graduate schools offer courses on religion and spirituality as electives, and Mr. Pargament is hopeful that such classes will become further integrated into the educational system.
Evidence of the greater acceptance of Mr. Pargament's work on spirituality and mental health is his winning the 2009 Oskar Pfister Award from the American Psychiatric Association for contributions to the dialogue concerning religion, spirituality, and psychiatry.
He will give a lecture to colleagues when he picks up the award at an association meeting in New York City in October.
He also was named editor in chief of the American Psychology Association's two-volume Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality.
Mr. Pargament, 58, said his work has had a beneficial impact on his own beliefs and spirituality. He is Jewish and although he and his wife are not Orthodox Jews, they joined Congregation Etz Chayim, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Toledo, because of their high regard for Rabbi Edward Garsek and the congregation.
"I've learned so much personally from all this. My own personal spiritual journey has been shaped by my research and my thinking. … I feel I've become more spiritual in the sense of seeing the sacred in many aspects of life, in seeing the sacred in music, nature, in loving relationships, in the world around us. And so my understanding of God and the sacred has broadened and deepened, I think, over the years. That's been a wonderful side effect of all this work."
Mr. Pargament said he is often asked if it is depressing to work with so many people who are going through difficult times.
"It's the exact opposite. You meet so many people who are exceptionally courageous, resilient, dealing with the worst situations, and you see how people do have a spiritual core, and you see them not just survive but flourish and grow and transform themselves. It's an honor to be able to talk to people in these situation and work with people in therapy who just are truly inspirational and I come out of it going, 'My gosh, it can be good to be part of the human race when there are people like this on the Earth.'•"
Contact David Yonke at:
dyonke@theblade.com
or 419-724-6154.
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