Abstract
The BioPsychoSocial-Spiritual (BPSS) model is the cornerstone of medical family therapy; however, therapists often feel uncertain about how to include spiritual and religious care into practice. Including spirituality and religion can become especially challenging in a brief therapy, hospital-based context when time is limited. In this chapter I will describe medical family therapy in the context of short-term care (one to three sessions) with brief interventions (15 min). I will explore the impact of acute illness on patients and families, underlying assumptions of integrating spirituality into MedFT, and the clinician’s role in IDENTIFYING how spirituality is impacting the patient’s/family’s experience of acute illness, INTERRUPTING ways that spirituality is having a harmful effect on the patient’s/family’s healing, and REINFORCING new, supporting, and expanded definitions of spirituality that support whole-person health. Two case examples, one individual patient and one couple, will highlight ways to integrate spirituality into brief medical family therapy.
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Nice, L. (2018). Making Each Moment Count: Supporting Justice-Informed, Whole-Person Health in Hospital-Based Brief Therapy for Acute Illness. In: Esmiol Wilson, E., Nice, L. (eds) Socially Just Religious and Spiritual Interventions. AFTA SpringerBriefs in Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01986-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01986-0_11
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