Spirituality, migration and psychiatry. A heated argument for Psychotherapy?

Abstract

Although medicine is practiced in a secular setting, religious and spiritual issues have an impact on patients’ perspectives regarding their health and the management of disorders that may afflict them. This is especially true in psychiatry, because spiritual and religious beliefs are prevalent among those with emotional or mental illness. Clinicians are rarely aware of the importance of religion and understand little of its value as a positive force for coping with the many difficulties that patients and their families must face. In this paper I want to present some clinical cases to discuss the relationship between religion, spirituality and psychiatric disorder. Particularly the author will underline the pathofacilitator or the pathoprotective effect of Christian’s, Muslim’s, Buddhism’s, Hinduism’s and Evangelical’s religion, through the analysis of specific clinical cases. The clinical cases showed will be focused on: psychosis, anxiety disorders, affective disorders, chronic pain disorder and somatic symptom disorder (Mattia et al., 2015).