Religion/Spirituality and Adolescent Psychiatric Symptoms: A Review

The aim of the current article is to review the literature on religion and spirituality as it pertains to adolescent psychiatric symptoms. One hundred and fifteen articles were reviewed that examined relationships between religion/spirituality and adolescent substance use, delinquency, depression, suicidality, and anxiety. Ninety-two percent of articles reviewed found at least one significant (p < .05) relationship between religiousness and better mental health. Evidence for relationships between greater religiousness and less psychopathology was strongest in the area of teenage substance use. Methods of measuring religion/spirituality were highly heterogeneous. Further research on the relationship of religion/spirituality to delinquency, depression, suicidality, and anxiety is warranted. Measurement recommendations, research priorities, and clinical implications are discussed.     

Religious and spiritual assessment of the child and adolescent

Assessment in child and adolescent psychiatry is a complex process that involves developmental, environmental, and experiential perspectives. Recently, there has been interest in including spiritual and religious assessment in the psychiatric assessment of children, but no well-recognized guidelines for such an assessment have been established. This article proposes an approach to spiritual assessment of children and adolescents that begins with developing an understanding of the family's spiritual and religious life, followed by a developmentally informed method of observing and talking with children and adolescents about their spiritual and religious beliefs. The article concludes with a discussion of ethical issues involved when the psychiatrist addresses issues of spirituality and religion with child and adolescent patients and their families.     

Developing a psychopathology curriculum during child and adolescent psychiatry residency training: general principles and a problem-based approach

Psychopathology is one of the core elements in a curriculum on child and adolescent psychiatry. Because there is no best-evidence model described for teaching this topic, an approach must be developed in each program that meets the standards set out by the Residency Review Committee and fully prepares its graduates to be competent child and adolescent psychiatrists. Methods used for teaching psychopathology may vary widely among programs and should be based on a sound educational rationale and adult learning principles that emphasize life-long, self-directed learning. This article describes an overall approach to curriculum design and expands on the use of problem-based learning as an educational method for teaching psychopathology in a child and adolescent psychiatry residency program.     

Spirituality, psychiatry and participation: a cultural analysis

This article begins by asking whether religion and spirituality are useful terms for cross-cultural comparisons. After discussing the increasing distinction between religion and spirituality in Western cultures, it points out how the terms religion and spirituality are used in divergent ways in the literature and the need for conceptual clarification in this area. Broadly, spirituality relates to interconnectedness, ultimate meaning or life force itself. The current use of the term spirituality in Western cultures derives both from Christian spirituality and 'New Age' thinking, which often appropriates ideas from Eastern religious traditions. The sociocultural roots of this division are complex, involving both growth of individualism, the pursuit of meaning and discontent with materialism and scientific rationalism. This situation is contrasted with other monotheistic religions where there is no distinction between religion and spirituality. This turn to spirituality has influenced health care professionals' conceptualizations of health and healing. The implications for psychiatry are discussed. I conclude that spirituality is a way of 'being in the world' and shares affinities with Tambiah's notion of a participatory mode of thinking.     

Child and adolescent psychopathology: spiritual and religious perspectives

This article addresses the relationship between children's religious beliefs and spiritual practices and the presence of psychopathology. Study of this subject represents a formidable task due to the complexity and diversity of the constructs involved, heterogeneity in religious beliefs and practices, and the difficulty in discriminating between the independent effects of religion and culture. Nevertheless, broad links between child psychopathology and spiritual/religious beliefs and practices are proposed. On the whole, the available empiric data suggest that religion is primarily health promoting in direct, positive benefits for children and in indirect, positive effects through parent and family functioning, although there are isolated exceptions. When spirituality and religious beliefs/practices are associated with negative mental health outcomes in children or their families, evidence points to "poorness-of-fit," based on an interaction between the child's psychopathology and aspects and religious beliefs/practice. Clinical implications of the findings and proposels are outlined.     

Ten-year review of rating scales. I: overview of scale functioning, psychometric properties, and selection

OBJECTIVE: As part of the Journal's 10-year Research Update Reviews, a series of articles will be presented on the role of rating scales in child and adolescent psychiatry. The first article in the series summarizes principles underlying scale functioning. METHOD: Sources were reviewed regarding testing theory, scale development, variability in scale functioning, psychometric properties, and scale selection. The extracted information was adapted to issues in child and adolescent psychiatry. RESULTS: Rating scales can make major contributions to understanding youths' needs. They provide easy and efficient measurement of psychopathology and quantify underlying constructs for comparison across youths, time, and applications. Although multiple factors may affect a scale's functioning, these factors can be understood and managed by considering the goals of measurement and basic psychometric principles. CONCLUSIONS: Potential users of rating scales should not blindly assume that a well-known scale will meet the measurement needs for a particular application. Rather, they can relatively easily educate themselves regarding the appropriate use of rating scales. This article provides the background information needed to evaluate scales for intended applications. It will also assist in reviewing the individual scales presented in subsequent articles in this series.     

Child and adolescent psychiatry: past scientific achievements and challenges for the future

The worldwide history of scientific achievements in child and adolescent psychopathology is reviewed from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Attention is drawn, e.g., to diagnostic distinctions, measures of psychopathology, the several roles of epidemiological longitudinal studies, temperament and personality, developmental psychopathology, the use of ‘natural experiments’ to test causal inferences, environmental risks, the importance of gene–environment interplay, the relative coming together of initially diverse psychological therapies, the use of randomized-controlled trials to assess treatment efficacy, and the value and limitations of pharmacotherapy. The article ends with a look ahead to the most important opportunities and challenges for child and adolescent psychiatry, plus the hazards that need to be avoided.     

Child and adolescent psychiatry and family therapy. An overview.

This article has provided an overview of the complex relationship between family therapy and child and adolescent psychiatry. Emphasis has been placed on the fact that the controversy and polarization that earlier characterized the relationship have delayed, but not blocked, the full integration of family therapy into child and adolescent psychiatry. Child psychiatrists and family therapists have been able to move beyond dichotomous polemics to combine the two fields in clinical practice, which has led to meaningful convergence in research and services. Family research has yielded important new directions for clinical practice in the areas of attachment, alcoholism, conduct disorder, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. It also has led to models of family continuity that have considerable potential for interrelating and possibly integrating different family therapy models. Family research also has uncovered family factors in the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology that can inform clinical practice. Convergence in the clinical domain has led to improved assessment and treatment across a wide range of child, adolescent, and family developmental, emotional, behavioral, and mental disorders. Finally, this article has reviewed the controversy over family systems therapy and the development of new directions in theory and practice to which this controversy has led. Despite the possibility that these new directions might lead to significant disruption and interference in the process of convergence, careful examination of the controversy and the new developments in practice suggests that rather than producing division between the two fields, the new developments, especially narrative therapy, are more likely to bring the two fields closer, particularly in the realm of interventive interviewing in family therapy.     

Religion and spirituality in psychiatric care: looking back, looking ahead

Cultural psychiatry has been an important contributor to the enhanced dialogue between psychiatry and religion in the past couple of decades. During this time, religion and spirituality have become more prominent in mainstream psychiatry in a number of areas of study and clinical care, including refugee and immigrant health, trauma and loss, psychotherapy, collaboration with clergy, bioethics, and psychiatric research. In looking towards the future, there is a great deal of promise for future enhancement of the study of religion and spirituality in psychiatric education, research, and clinical care.     

Child and adolescent psychiatry its problems and foresight]

Accompanying the fall in birth rate, problems pertaining to the child's mind such as school in attendance, bullying, violence in the school, intrafamilial violence, eating disorders, substance abuse, and child abuse have rocketed and diversified, in addition to affecting increasingly lower age groups. The importance of child and adolescent psychiatry has never been more profound, but our country, without a chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the medical school framework, and lacking recognition of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as a clinical department has undoubtedly become an underdeveloped country in terms of child and adolescent psychiatric care. The medical schools have been in the process of review and reorganization these past few years. The range of mental science is wide, and despite being a major discipline constituting one of the two arms of medical science together with somatic medicine, it is regarded as a minor existence in our country. This is the time to re-establish mental science, with areas such as child and adolescent psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, social psychiatry, and crime psychiatry placed on an equal footing with general psychiatry. Turning our eyes on the world, the children are being robbed of their mental health as refugees, through child labor, starvation, and civil war. The demand of this age is true symbiosis, surpassing differences in race, religion, language, and culture, which is probably the indispensable element in the quest for a happy future for the children of this age.     

Update on Mental Health of Infants and Children of Parents Affected With Mental Health Issues

This paper highlights the most recent publications, in the field of psychiatry, on offspring of patients with psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and then summarizes what we know about the progeny of adults with mood disorders, the most prevalent of parental disorders. Studies examining personality disorders and contextual factors such as stress and trauma are examined with a focus on the crucial question of development and attachment status in children. Findings converge to reveal that offspring of parents (generally mothers) with most major psychiatric disorders present a higher risk for all mental disorders, and a wide range of disorders are also found in children, adolescent, and finally adult offspring of mothers with mood and anxiety disorders. Developmental psychopathology and infant and child psychiatry have focused on early relationship formation through social interaction and attachment patterns as pathways affected by vulnerability or resilience factors. First year of life longitudinal studies following mothers and infants has shown that maternal psychopathology is positively correlated with higher risk of attachment issues. It would seem that pathology appears when adaptation to real-life contexts becomes difficult in association with an accumulation of negative individual characteristics and environmental circumstances. We suggest that in order to move forward psychiatry should embrace a developmental cascade model, which posits a cumulative pathway for the emergence of psychopathology in the developing child. We propose that we have sufficient knowledge today to start implementing multilevel approaches to enhance the health and mental health of the next generation.     

Overview of training in the twenty-first century

This article provides a summary of the history of the development of the subspecialty of child and adolescent psychiatry and the concomitant development of training in the field. The historical perspective provides a context for the discussion of an overview of child and adolescent psychiatry training in the twenty-first century. Four challenges are identified: recruitment, funding, curriculum, and assessment and remediation, each of which is discussed in some depth. The article concludes with a perspective that focuses efforts in training more on basic core competencies rather than the rapidly expanding and changing medical knowledge and specific clinical interventions relevant to the field.     

Unexpected death or suicide by a child or adolescent: improving responses and preparedness of child and adolescent psychiatry trainees

The death of a young patient is a difficult but universal experience in the field of medicine. It is less common in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. However, when a child or adolescent patient commits suicide, a child and adolescent psychiatry trainee's response could include shock, denial, disbelief, sadness, sleep difficulties, rumination about patient's death, fears of litigation, social withdrawal, and a sense of failure. Trainees generally find themselves dealing with the academic, personal, administrative, and legal consequences of this unfortunate but unavoidable event. This article attempts to review the literature on the experience of patients' unexpected death, including suicide, on child and adolescent psychiatry trainees.     

Spirituality and religion in Canadian psychiatric residency training.

OBJECTIVE: Mental health professionals are increasingly aware of the need to incorporate a patient's religious and spiritual beliefs into mental health assessments and treatment plans. Recent changes in assessment and treatment guidelines in the US have resulted in corresponding curricular changes, with at least 16 US psychiatric residency programs now offering formal training in religious and spiritual issues. We present a survey of training currently available to Canadian residents in psychiatry and propose a lecture series to enhance existing training. METHODS: We surveyed all 16 psychiatry residency programs in Canada to determine the extent of currently available training in religion and spirituality as they pertain to psychiatry. RESULTS: We received responses from 14 programs. Of these, 4 had no formal training in this area. Another 4 had mandatory academic lectures dedicated to the interface of religion, spirituality, and psychiatry. Nine programs offered some degree of elective, case-based supervision. CONCLUSION: Currently, most Canadian programs offer minimal instruction on issues pertaining to the interface of religion, spirituality, and psychiatry. A lecture series focusing on religious and spiritual issues is needed to address this apparent gap in curricula across the country. Therefore, we propose a 10-session lecture series and outline its content. Including this lecture series in core curricula will introduce residents in psychiatry to religious and spiritual issues as they pertain to clinical practice.     

Help seeking for emotional and behavioural problems in children and adolescents

In order to understand the discrepancy between rates of child and adolescent psychopathology and rates of mental health service use, variables influencing the help-seeking process need to be investigated. The present article aims to extend and refine previous findings by reviewing 47 recent empirical studies on parental and adolescent problem recognition and help seeking, and problem recognition by the general practitioner (GP). Several variables (child age, the presence of medical and school-related problems, informal help seeking, past treatment of parents or relatives, family size, and type of maltreatment) were discovered to influence parental/adolescent problem recognition and/or help seeking,while refinements were found for the effects of type of psychopathology, child gender, adolescent attitudes and personality, parental psychopathology, social support, and sociodemographic variables. Although recent studies uncovered several determinants of problem recognition by the GP (child gender, age, past treatment, academic problems, family composition, life events, type of visit, and acquaintance with child), this aspect of the help-seeking pathway remains relatively uncharted and, therefore, needs to be the focus of future research.     

Religious and spiritual aspects of family assessment

Childhood emotional and behavioral problems have increased over the past several decades, and the consequences of these behaviors have an impact on the entire family. The role of the family in these problems is clearly an important consideration for the child psychiatrist. A specific understanding of how the family's spiritual worldview or religious convictions impact clinical problems has been underappreciated. The religious orientation or spirituality of parents influences various aspects of family life, from ideals about marriage and family to specifics regarding child rearing. This article reviews the goals of assessment of family religious or spiritual worldview, which include empathically engaging the family of a child in treatment, developing a formulation of how these spiritual factors impact general family functioning, and determining whether the family's religion and spirituality are a resource for treatment or a contributor to disorder. The spiritual and religious assessment of the family facilitates the development of a treatment plan.     

Enjeux actuels de l’évaluation psychologique dans la clinique de l’enfant et de l’adolescent : vers une approche intégrée de la psychopathologie

This article will discuss different theoretical approaches and methods of data collection in view of the psychological assessment of children and adolescents. There are generally two different approaches; one being the single case study using a subjective method and the second consisting of clinical interviews and psychological tests using the objective method. In our opinion, psychological assessments should rely on two main axes. The first should be based on an updated knowledge of psychopathology, integrating new models and scientific findings with the methodology of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). The second axis should be concerned with the psychological assessment combining subjective and objective methods. For example, the use of standardized tools such as scales or projective tests is essential to understand the interaction between multiple clinical variables influencing child psychopathology as well as to understand family and social interactions. The diversity of risk factors (e.g. family, personality, social, biological factors, etc.), implicated in mental illness shows the multi-dimensional aspects of psychopathology. Different theoretical approaches have been developed to study psycho-pathological mechanisms (neuro-psychology, psychoanalysis, biological psychiatry approaches, etc.). Therefore an integrative approach of psychopathology using different models and factors is needed to understand psychiatric disorders. A thorough psychological assessment is essential to the comprehension of mental illness in children and adolescents and is the first step to tailor treatments to individual needs. In order to answer these objectives, psychological assessments must be multi-modal, multi-disciplinary and multi-source: - Multi-disciplinary: For a better clinical assessment, psychologists and psychiatrists will need information from other professionals such as speech therapists, psychomotor therapists, neurologists… - Multi-modal: This aspect is crucial in clinical assessment. It characterizes all tools that clinicians will use in their assessment practice: Psychological tests, clinical interviews or clinical scales. - Multi-source: A comprehensive assessment of child and adolescent psychopathology includes assessments of different informants and sources (family, teachers…). These different approaches will be discussed in the perspective of the actual stakes of psychological assessment in children and adolescents. Developing integrative assessment approaches seems to be a promising field for the future in mental health services, allowing the tailoring of specific therapeutics for each child.     

Changing views: New perspectives in child psychiatric research

Research in child and adolescent psychiatry has remarkably changed during the last two decades. In general, there is a strong trend towards empirically based research in all relevant areas, including basic research as well as psychotherapy and prevention. Important contemporary research fields are: epidemiology, developmental psychopathology, family psychopathology, electrophysiology, neuropsychology, genetics, and the application of the new imaging techniques in child psychiatric disorders. Several methods applied in these fields have been developed in non-medical disciplines so that it has been and will be an interdisciplinary task to integrate them into child psychiatry as a medical discipline. New journals, most of them using an interdisciplinary approach, have substantially contributed to the spread of knowledge and have improved the quality of scientific contributions worldwide. Nevertheless, there are also deficits and shortcomings: In general, there is not enough support for research in the field of child psychiatry and developmental psychopathology. In many countries, there is also a deficit with regard to education and training of young researchers. There are not enough positions for senior researchers within departments of child and adolescent psychiatry, and there is also a deficit of research departments in the field without an overload of clinical tasks. However, in many places the given resources are not adequately used, and very often, there is also a lack of interdisciplinary cooperation. Besides these general shortcomings, there are also deficits with regard to conceptualization and evaluation of treatment methods and measures of prevention. To overcome these deficits and shortcomings will be an important task for the future.     

Religion, spirituality and the well-being of informal caregivers: a review, critique, and research prospectus

The purpose of this article is to review and critique the published literature examining the relationships between religion/spirituality and caregiver well-being and to provide directions for future research. A systematic search was conducted using bibliographic databases, reference sections of articles, and by contacting experts in the field. Articles were reviewed for measurement, theoretical, and design limitations. Eighty-three studies were retrieved. Research on religion/spirituality and caregiver well-being is a burgeoning area of investigation; 37% of the articles were published in the last five years. Evidence for the effects of religion/spirituality were unclear; the preponderance (n = 71, 86%) of studies found no or a mixed association (i.e., a combination of positive, negative, or non-significant results) between religion/spirituality and well-being. These ambiguous results are a reflection of the multidimensionality of religion/spirituality and the diversity of well-being outcomes examined. They also partially reflect the frequent use of unrefined measures of religion/spirituality and of atheoretical approaches to studying this topic. Investigators have a fairly large number of studies on religion/spirituality and caregiver well-being on which to build. Future studies should be theory driven and utilize psychometrically sound measures of religion/spirituality. Suggestions are provided to help guide future work.     

The child and adolescent track in the forensic fellowship

Exposure to child and adolescent forensic issues is limited in general psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry residency programs. There is no Graduate Medical Education Program for child and adolescent forensic psychiatry that is approved by the American Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Forensic psychiatry residency directors can create a child-focused forensic training opportunity that meets the needs of the ACGME program in forensic psychiatry. By creating didactic, clinical, and research experiences relevant to child and adolescent forensic psychiatric issues, this much-needed training can be provided to qualified psychiatrists.