Many spiritual caregivers, including chaplains, spiritual directors and clergy, are unaware of how they can support people with chronic health conditions. This book combines insights on chronic illness with spiritual care skills and suggestions to enhance well-being for people living with long-term illness. Using a narrative approach, the author reflects on the stories of two women - Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who travels from Kansas (a state of health) to Oz (an illness experience), alongside the author's personal experiences of managing an incurable autoimmune disease. Chapters will include guidelines and exercises that help equip caregivers to facilitate healing with people who live with long-term health conditions.

Fusing the disciplines of health care, spiritual care, and social services, this book examines the relationship between chronic illness and spirituality. Contributors include professionals working in traditional, holistic and integrative clinical settings, as well as religious studies scholars and spiritual practitioners.

This book explores how people draw upon spiritual, religious, or faith-based practices to support their mental wellness amidst forms of chronicity. From diverse global contexts and spiritual perspectives, this volume critically examines several chronic conditions, such as psychosis, diabetes, depression, oppressive forces of colonization and social marginalization, attacks of spirit possession, or other forms of persistent mental duress. As an inter- and transdisciplinary collection, the chapters include innovative ethnographic observations and over 300 in-depth interviews with care providers and individuals living in chronicity, analyzed primarily from the phenomenological and hermeneutic meaning-making traditions. Overall, this book depicts a modern global era in which spiritualty and religion maintain an important role in many peoples’ lives, underscoring a need for increased awareness, intersectoral collaboration, and practical training for varied care providers. This book will be of interest to scholars of religion and health, the sociology and psychology of religion, medical and psychological anthropology, religious studies, and global health studies, as well as applied health and mental health professionals in psychology, social work, physical and occupational therapy, cultural psychiatry, public health, and medicine.

This book provides an alternative, complementary approach to the existing conventional approaches to religious and spiritually oriented coping. By focusing on the role of culture, the authors take into account the methods employed by a vast number of people who do not directly identify themselves as religious. The empirical data used in this book derive from studies conducted in several countries; Sweden, China, South Korea, Turkey and Malaysia, across which religion plays a different role in the social and cultural life of individuals. This approach and these empirical data are unique and allow comparisons to be made between different cultural settings. By introducing the concept of meaning-making coping, the authors explore the influence of culture on choice of coping methods, be they purely religious, spiritual or existential. The term "existential meaning-making coping" is used to describe coping methods that are related to existential questions; these methods include religious, spiritual and existential coping methods. Meaning-making Methods for Coping with Serious Illness contributes to new approaches and theoretical models of coping. As such it is an invaluable resource for health care, medical, public health and sociology students and researchers. It will also be of interest to educators and policy-makers working in the area of health.

The Routledge International Handbook of Couple and Family Therapy is a comprehensive text that promotes innovative frameworks and interventions in couple and family therapy from a cross cultural perspective. A diverse range of international contributors explore the role that demography, regionality, cultural and political crises, and policy, have on the issues faced by couples and families. Collectively, the chapters articulate unique ideas in conceptualizing the needs of families with international backgrounds, adapting the current models and frameworks to work with this population most effectively. The text is split into four sections covering: personal voices and philosophical perspectives, theory and models, specific applications with international populations, and emerging perspectives. This handbook is essential for individual practitioners, researchers, psychotherapists, and related mental health professionals, as well as academics with an interest in working with couples and families.

Spirituality and Health: Multidisciplinary Explorations examines the relationship between health/well-being and spirituality. Chap-lains and pastoral counsellors offer evidence-based research on the importance of spirituality in holistic health care, and practitioners in the fields of occupational therapy, clinical psychology, nursing, and oncology share how spirituality enters into their healing practices. Unique for its diversity, this collection explores the relationship between biomedical, psychological, and spiritual points of view about health and healing.

Portrait therapy reverses the traditional roles in art therapy, utilising Edith Kramer's concept of the art therapist's 'third hand' to collaboratively design and paint their clients' portraits. It addresses 'disrupted' self-identity, which is common in serious illness and characterised by statements like 'I don't know who I am anymore' and 'I'm not the person I used to be'. This book explores the theory and practice of portrait therapy, including Kenneth Wright's theory of 'mirroring and attunement'. Case studies, accompanied by colour portraits, collages and prose-poems, provide insight into the intervention and the author highlights the potential for portrait therapy to be used with other client groups in the future.

"Palliative Care Nursing: Caring for Suffering Patients explores the concept of suffering as it relates to nursing practice. This text helps practicing nurses and students define and recognize various aspects of suffering across the lifespan and within various patient populations while providing guidance in alleviating suffering. In addition, it examines spiritual and ethical perspectives on suffering and discusses how witnessing suffering impacts nurses' ability to assume the professional role. Further, the authors discuss ways nurses as witnesses to suffering can optimize their own coping skills and facilitate personal growth. Rich in case studies, pictures, and reflections on nursing practice and life experiences, Palliative Care Nursing: Caring for Suffering Patients delves into key topics such as how to identify when a patient is suffering, whether they are coping, sources of coping facades, what to do to ease suffering, and how to convey the extent of suffering to members of the health care team.Palliative Care Nursing: Caring for Suffering Patients helps practicing nurses and students define and recognize various aspects of suffering across the lifespan and within various patient populations while providing guidance in alleviating suffering"--

This interdisciplinary study details spiritual approaches including meditation and yoga shown to be helpful in improving physical and psychological well-being. Whether a person suffers from a psychological or physical malady, such as depression, addictions, chronic pain, cancer, or complications from pregnancy, the best practice treatments likely include one common thread: spiritual practice. From meditation and yoga to spiritual surrender and religious rituals, spiritual practices are increasingly being recognized as physically and mentally beneficial for recovering from illness and for retaining optimal health. Healing with Spiritual Practices: Proven Techniques for Disorders from Addictions and Anxiety to Cancer and Chronic Pain, edited by the director of one of the nation's best-known university institutes of spirituality and health, explains current and emerging practices, their benefits, and the growing body of research that proves them effective. Comprising chapters from expert contributors, this book will appeal to students, scholars, and other readers interested in psychology, medicine, nursing, social work, pastoral care, and related disciplines.