International collaborative Research Project – Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy
For most of the 20th century, mainstream healthcare professionals have ignored the role of spirituality in therapeutic healing. Recently this has changed as scholars and practitioners have started to discuss and apply a variety of spiritual treatment approaches, grounded in the healing practices of both Western and Eastern spiritual traditions (e.g., prayer, meditation, gratitude, love, forgiveness, altruistic service). Although research has started to examine these approaches, there is still paucity in our research-based knowledge on them. Without a larger and more thorough research base, spiritual approaches will remain at the fringes of the mental health and medical fields, which will deprive many people of access to sensitive and effective services.
The Consortium for Spiritually Centered Psychology and Education, which resides in the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, has initiated a research project, Enhancing Practice-Based Evidence for Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies: An Interdisciplinary Big Data Project, supported with funding from the John Templeton Foundation. This research initiative is dedicated to creating an international interdisciplinary collaborative network of researchers and practitioners to contribute to research and practice concerned with spiritually integrated psychotherapy.
The project is a “practice as usual” study of spiritually integrated psychotherapy with 21 different collaborating research teams in North America, Israel, and several additional countries. Each of the researchers, and their research teams, collaborate with Professor Richards by using an Internet-based “Bridges Assessment System” to contribute to a “big data” set. This is the largest study of spiritually integrated psychotherapies ever conducted.
http://www.bridgesconsortium.net/grant-projects/