Abstract
In patient-centred care, religious and spiritual needs and values of patients are increasingly underlined. The field of psychiatry and psychotherapy is no exception in this regard, so more attention and research are required. In addition to existing research, taking a further step, we would like to know whether there are any cultural differences in regard to staffs’ religious and spiritual values, and their attitudes to deal with religious or spiritual issues in clinical settings. For that reason, comparative studies were conducted in Germany and Korea. As a result, we found that German psychiatric staffs have more positive perspectives on religion and related aspects than Korean, not only in their personal lives but also in therapeutic settings. Furthermore, some contradictions regarding religiosity and spirituality were shown in staffs’ professional attitudes of both countries. Above all, in consideration of professional neutrality respondents are reluctant to handle such issues in therapeutic settings. For Korean psychiatric staffs, another important reason was that they are predominantly atheists or agonistics. German psychiatric staffs referred to have insufficient time. The kind of professionality which they are proclaiming to keep during the therapeutic processes is shown to be inadequate for several reasons. For genuinely wholistic care, more cross-cutural and in-depth studies are needed. Furthermore, professional self-contradictions deserve further attention and reflection, for the patients’ sake.
Highlights
There has been an exponentially growing body of research in English-speaking journals on “Religion and Health”, including mental health [1] [2] [3] [4]
We found that German psychiatric staffs have more positive perspectives on religion and related aspects than Korean, in their personal lives and in therapeutic settings
There has literally been the birth of an entire new field, the field of religion, spirituality, and health.”. These remarks include manifold research concerning religious and spiritual needs and attitudes of patients in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic patient care, both in Germany and in Korea such research is still comparatively rare, notwithstanding increasing efforts in Germany [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]. These efforts in the meantime resulted into a Position Paper of DGPPN (German Society of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology) first published in 2016 [10]
Summary
There has been an exponentially growing body of research in English-speaking journals on “Religion and Health”, including mental health [1] [2] [3] [4]. There has literally been the birth of an entire new field, the field of religion, spirituality, and health.” These remarks include manifold research concerning religious and spiritual needs and attitudes of patients in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic patient care, both in Germany and in Korea such research is still comparatively rare, notwithstanding increasing efforts in Germany [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]. These efforts in the meantime resulted into a Position Paper of DGPPN (German Society of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology) first published in 2016 [10]. These recommendations strongly correspond to the research concept of our Freiburg research group created in 2009
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