NCAD: Could spiritual care be the missing piece in facilities?

Some of the most prominent names in the addiction treatment industry use a spiritual care professional as part of their treatment team, and an audience at the National Conference on Alcohol & Addiction Disorders (NCAD) on Monday was urged to do the same at their facilities.

The director of spiritual care at Refuge Recovery Centers said that a spiritual care professional (called a “chaplain” in some organizations) can be an important relationship-builder with patients in treatment and post-treatment support. The Rev. Joseph Rogers, an ordained Buddhist minister who is in long-term recovery, personalized the subject by relating how a chaplain had helped him through a tumultuous freshman year in college by visiting him daily.

“He didn't talk to me about Jesus—he talked to me about me,” Rogers said. “He assessed where I was and reached out to me with an intervention.”

Although treatment centers such as Cumberland Heights, Ashley Addiction Treatment, Menninger and Caron Treatment Centers employ spiritual care professionals, there remain several gaps in the field's knowledge of spiritual care's role in behavioral health treatment and recovery. These range from a basic lack of agreement on a working definition of spirituality to a dearth of research addressing whether having a chaplaincy in a treatment program improves patient outcomes.

Rogers described his role as not one of preaching about spirituality or religion, but lifting up patients so they can more easily find their own spiritual path.

“I get to share my brokenness with another person,” he says, communicating with the patient that it's OK to hurt.

Advice for programs

Rogers' breakout session talk at the Anaheim, Calif., conference offered guidance on several aspects of spiritual care in addiction treatment:

• With no accepted standard of care for spiritual care professionals in addiction treatment, he recommended that treatment facilities adopt the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA's) core competencies for clergy working in the field.

• He highlighted two instruments that he favors for measuring a patient's dimensions of spirituality: the Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality (which measures variables such as meaning, values and forgiveness) and The Spirituality Index of Well-Being, a 20-item questionnaire.

• Such instruments can measure spirituality—something that is present in some form in all individuals—but only a person who actively listens to a patient and develops a rapport can conduct a true spiritual assessment that leads to a care plan that includes a spiritual component, Rogers said.