Awards Recognize Residencies for Incorporating Spirituality

The first psychiatry residency training programs to receive the prestigious John Templeton Awards on Spirituality and Medicine were announced at a press briefing in Washington, D.C., last month.

"This is the first time awards have been given for educating U.S. psychiatric residents about their patients' spirituality," commented David Larson, M.D., a psychiatrist and president of the National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR), which sponsored the briefing. NIHR is a private organization in Bethesda, Md., that studies spirituality and health and obtains award funding from Templeton.

The awards will fund new curricula on spirituality or existing curricula with new elements.

Curriculum proposals from psychiatric residency programs at seven medical schools across the nation won the awards (see below). Academic psychiatrists will direct the courses or codirect them with members of the clergy. Each winning proposal will receive $15,000 for the 1998-99 program year.

Spiritual Issues

"These courses will help psychiatric residents to address spiritual issues in the diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of patients, including referring them, when applicable, to chaplains and clergy," Larson commented at the briefing.

"This is a seminal event in a field that, since Freud, hasn't looked favorably upon religion and spirituality," he added.

He noted that APA encourages its members to respect patients' religious views and not to impose their own religious or antireligious attitudes on patients.

Moreover, several APA members were judges on the seven-member panel for the Templeton awards in psychiatry including Elizabeth Bowman, M.D., Nalini Juthani, M.D., James Lomax, M.D., and Francis Lu, M.D. Bowman and Juthani serve on APA's Committee on Religion and Psychiatry, Lu is chair of the Media Subcommittee of APA's Scientific Program Committee, and Lomax is an APA-appointed member to the Residency Review Committee for Psychiatry and a consultant to the Committee on Graduate Education.

Bowman told Psychiatric News, "The seven winners were picked from among 15 good applications because they had a strong, relatively extensive curriculum, a committed director, and the ability to reach residents and students during several years of residency.

Course Topics

"We were interested in curricula that were scientifically sound, showed clinically relevant topics, and displayed an interest in religion and spirituality without a bias toward a single religion."

A case in point that fits Bowman's description is the curriculum for PGY-4 residents at the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program in Boston. The course includes the following topics:

• The relevance of religious and spiritual issues to clinical work and an overview of the historical relationship between psychiatry and religion.


• The psychology of religion, including developmental, psychodynamic, and psychopathological aspects.


• Faith and healing studies of religion and medical outcomes, and uses of spiritual practices in healing.


• A panel discussion with clergy representing alternative views on emotional healing.

Bowman continued, "Because the Templeton grant program places a higher judging premium on required courses, most of the applications specified required courses or some required elements. This is a change from the past when it was rare to have an elective course on religion or spirituality for psychiatric residents, let alone having a required course."

The special requirements by the RRC for Psychiatry "have undoubtedly made it easier for educators to justify a required course in spirituality and religion," Bowman observed.

The RRC required training programs to include in their didactic curriculum by January 1995 religious and spiritual factors that influence patients' development and instruction about American cultures and subcultures as they relate to religion and spirituality.

Bowman said she believes "these curricula will move the field forward by exposing residents to research in religion and spirituality and psychiatry. We would like to have more young psychiatrists doing research in this area." He added, "More importantly, there will be more clinicians trained in addressing the spiritual aspects of their patients' lives."

Larson commented that there is a growing interest among medical schools to address patients' spirituality.

NIHR, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, will offer the Faith and Medicine Curricular Awards again this year. Nineteen schools have received awards of $25,000 each since 1995 for developing and implementing curricula on spirituality and medicine over the four years of medical school.

There were about 100 applicants for the awards this year compared with 19 in 1995.

Bowman, who is also one of the judges for the Templeton medical school curricula awards, noted, "There continues to be some stellar medical schools applying, and the quality of the curricula continues to be very strong."

The winners have included Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Award Winners