UMB’s Michelle Pearce to Lead Global Expansion of Spiritual Competency Training for Mental Health Professionals
New international initiative will expand an evidence-based training program developed in part at the University of Maryland, Baltimore
Michelle J. Pearce, PhD, professor at the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies (UMSGS), will lead the Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) initiative as part of a new three-year, $3 million project funded by the John Templeton Foundation to advance spiritually competent mental health care worldwide.
The multi-institutional project brings together researchers, educators, and clinicians from six universities and international partners across multiple countries. Led overall by Daniel Gutierrez, PhD, of Virginia Commonwealth University, the project includes two complementary initiatives designed to better prepare mental health professionals to address the spiritual, religious, secular, and existential dimensions of their clients’ lives.
Pearce will lead the Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) initiative, which builds on more than a decade of research and curriculum development aimed at addressing a longstanding gap in mental health education: Although spirituality and religion can play important roles in how people understand suffering, cope with adversity, find meaning, and recover, many mental health professionals receive little formal training in how to address these dimensions of clients’ lives ethically and effectively.
"Spirituality and religion can be important parts of people’s identities and of how they understand and cope with difficult experiences, yet most mental health professionals receive little training in how to address these areas in clinical practice," Pearce said.
Our goal is to give clinicians the knowledge, skills, and self-awareness to address spirituality and religion when they are relevant to the client, while always respecting the client’s own beliefs and values.”
Pearce is a clinical psychologist whose research has focused extensively on the intersections among spirituality, religion, coping, and health. She co-developed SCT-MH with Kenneth I. Pargament, PhD, and colleagues as an evidence-based training program to increase mental health professionals’ competence in addressing spiritual and religious issues in clinical care.
Research on SCT-MH has demonstrated improvements in clinicians’ spiritual and religious competencies, and subsequent work led by Pearce and colleagues examined how the curriculum could be integrated directly into graduate mental health education.
In a national multisite study, graduate students who received SCT-MH content embedded within their existing courses demonstrated significant gains in the attitudes, knowledge, and skills needed to address spiritual and religious dimensions of clients’ lives.
The new project represents the next stage in that work: moving an empirically supported training approach toward broader international dissemination and cultural adaptation.
Under Pearce’s leadership, the SCT-MH team will develop and expand a foundational online training program for mental health professionals and work with international collaborators to ensure that the training is relevant across diverse cultural and religious contexts. International partners will help adapt, pilot, refine, and evaluate the program within their own settings.
"We now have a strong foundation of research showing that spiritual competency can be taught," Pearce said. "This next phase gives us the opportunity to build on that work and collaborate with colleagues around the world to understand how the training needs to be adapted for different cultural and religious contexts. We want this to be a truly collaborative process rather than simply taking a U.S.-developed program and applying it elsewhere."
The broader project will involve collaborators in Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark.
SCT-MH teaches clinicians foundational competencies such as how to assess spirituality and religion appropriately, recognize both spiritual resources and spiritual struggles, examine their own assumptions and biases, and determine when consultation, collaboration, or referral may be appropriate. The approach recognizes that clients may identify as religious, spiritual, secular, atheist, agnostic, or in other ways, and that spiritually competent care requires respecting the client’s worldview rather than imposing the clinician’s own beliefs.
"UMB’s commitment to research advances care in many ways including improving how health professionals are educated," said UMB Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of UMSGS Kenneth H. Wong, PhD. "Dr. Pearce and her colleagues have shown that clinicians can learn to address the spiritual and religious concerns that matter to their patients’ care. Their findings give educators evidence to guide what they teach and better prepare clinicians to care for the whole person. This international collaboration takes that work further, bringing UMB research to more communities while learning from partners how to adapt the training to the people they serve."
For Pearce, the project also reflects UMB’s commitment to preparing health professionals to provide whole-person, culturally responsive care.
"Clinicians don’t need to be experts in every religious or spiritual tradition to provide spiritually competent care," Pearce said. "What they need is the ability to listen with openness and curiosity, ask appropriate questions, recognize when spiritual or religious concerns are aSecting a client’s well-being, and respond in ways that respect the client’s beliefs and values. Those are skills we can teach."
In addition to Pearce and Gutierrez, the project team includes Joseph Currier, PhD, of the University of South Alabama; Kenneth I. Pargament, PhD, of Bowling Green State University; Nicole Silverio, PhD, of the University of South Carolina; and David Rosmarin, PhD, of Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital.
