McLean program blends spirituality with counseling
McLean Hospital psychologists are enlisting practices traditionally ignored as irrelevant to mental health care — religion and spirituality — as new allies in a program that blends them with counseling in patient therapy. David H. Rosmarin, director of McLean’s Spirituality and Mental Health Program and an assistant professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, developed the program in 2017 after a hospital survey showed that 80 percent of patients found religion useful in dealing with stress and that more than half wanted religion to be part of their treatment. The results indicated, he said, that religion and spirituality are not only potentially powerful forces in the emotional lives of many patients, but also that caregivers were missing an opportunity for healing. “There’s been a very tense history between religion and psychology especially. … Freud thought of religion as a neurosis. He believed that the only reason somebody would gravitate toward...