Sub-Project 4: Promoting Spiritual and Religious Competency Training for Mental Health Professionals: A Systems-Change Endeavor

University of California, San Diego

Investigators

Cassandra Vieten (Sub-Project PI)

James Pittman

Joe Currier

Jesse Fox

Purpose

This sub-project uses a targeted systems-change approach. We will develop and pursue a set of coordinated activities, informed by diverse stakeholders in the U.S. mental health care system, to pull key levers that are designed to strategically shift system-wide attitudes, values, and priorities about integrating R/S competencies throughout graduate education and clinical training across counseling, marriage and family therapy, psychology, and social work.

Background 

Targeted systems-change is: 

• A way of strategically transforming a system by identifying key stakeholders, assets, opportunities, challenges, and primary levers for change

• An empowering, bottom-up approach that relies on developing collective solutions via community participatory work and building a learning culture

• How training in other multicultural competencies (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender diversity) has become standard across graduate and post-graduate programs 

In this case, we are “targeting” integration of R/S competencies into mental health professional training. To do this, we will:

• Develop a roadmap for a systems-change approach to integrating R/S competencies into training that will identify a set of coordinated activities to facilitate inclusion of R/S competencies into training

• Develop partnerships across each tier of the overall mental health care system — policy, education/training, practice settings, clinicians, and consumers with lived experience

• Develop an online platform for faculty, supervisors, training directors, and other leaders to access resources and tools for integrating R/S competencies into their training activities 

• Create an evidence map and data visualization map that demonstrates the impact of R/S competency training and offers an interactive platform for stakeholders to interact with the available data and evaluate the evidence

• Develop an open-access, practice-oriented book that will serve as another means of disseminating findings, resources, and tools generated across the four sub-projects and others’ work to support faculty, supervisors, and clinicians to integrate R/S competency training into their education and training activities

Other specific activities we may engage in, or support other groups in accomplishing, include:

• Working with mental health professional associations to adopt R/S competency guidelines

• Approaching undergraduate and graduate-level textbook authors with empirically supported R/S content for inclusion into the next editions of their textbooks

• Engaging in systematic outreach to graduate and clinical training directors to increase awareness of the evidence base for including R/S competency training

• Identifying language, framing, and messaging that is effective in stimulating inclusion of R/S competencies in training among those who may oppose such inclusion

• Investigating systemic implicit biases and identify methods to bring such biases to light

• Advocating for large funding organizations (e.g., NIMH, SAMHSA) to increase funding mechanisms that include research and training in R/S competencies

• Outreach to large mental health care delivery systems to make the case for increasing service utilization by under-served communities by enhancing R/S competency training

• Organizing a mental health care consumer effort to communicate their desire for clinicians to be competent in R/S, and to have their R/S addressed in mental health care