Miscarriage,Religious Participation,and Mental Health

Approximately 15–20 percent of pregnancies result in miscarriage, yet pregnancy loss remains a socially taboo topic and one that has received limited attention in the literature. Utilizing nationally representative longitudinal data from the NLSY97, this study examines the influence of miscarriage on mental health and whether this relationship is moderated by religious participation. Results from this study suggest that miscarriage is associated with lower mental health among women who also experience a live birth. Results also suggest that religious participation moderates the relationship between miscarriage and mental health; religion is more likely to lead to increases in mental health among women who experience a miscarriage than among women who do not experience a miscarriage. Overall, evidence suggests that religion may be an important coping mechanism for women who deal with pregnancy loss.     

Religious Doubt and Mental Health Across the Lifespan

The current study examined the connections among religious doubt, mental health, and aging in a nationwide sample of individuals 18 years and older (N = 1629). Findings indicate that that religious doubt emerging from the recognition of suffering and evil in the world has a deleterious impact on mental health. Results also show that as people grow older, religious doubts continue to be associated with psychopathology, but the magnitude of this association becomes weaker across age categories. In other words, the impact of doubt on mental distress declines as one ages. These effects were found across various measures of mental distress, including depression, general anxiety, interpersonal sensitivity, paranoia, hostility, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Findings are explored within the context of psychosocial development and the experiential trajectory of religious maturity.     

An Examination of Disclosure,Mental Health Treatment use,and Posttraumatic Growth Among College Women Who Experienced Sexual Victimization

Few investigations have sought to identify factors associated with posttraumatic growth among survivors of sexual victimization. The present study examined the relationship between posttraumatic growth, disclosure, and mental health treatment use following sexual assault. Undergraduate female psychology students (N = 85), who reported a prior history of sexual victimization, completed measures assessing trauma exposure, posttraumatic growth, disclosure, and mental health treatment use. Results revealed that degree of disclosure of the assault to support sources and mental health treatment use following sexual assault was related to increased posttraumatic growth. Findings have valuable implications for treatment interventions for survivors of sexual trauma.     

Utilizing Religious Schemas to Cope with Mental Illness

Recent Gallup Polls suggest that 96% of Americans polled believe in God or a universal supreme being (Gallup, 1995). In addition, large percentages of Americans polled report that they pray or believe in miracles. It appears then that religious belief might be a useful coping strategy for those experiencing significant distress or illness. Although much of the research regarding religious coping and illness has focused on physical illness, it seems likely that religious coping would also be useful to those who are experiencing a mental illness. Existing data regarding the use of religious coping and mental illness is discussed, and Daniel McIntosh's theory of religion as a cognitive schema is applied to those suffering severe mental illness.     

Mapping Men's Mental Health

The central theme of this paper is that men are at one and the same time both damaged and damage-doing. The process of being damaged through the agency of masculinity predisposes men to exploit, dominate and abuse—not only as boys, as partners and fathers, but as priests, teachers, therapists, lawyers, nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists. Mental health services need to see both aspects of this male equation: a focus on male abuse alone leads to punishment, containment and, very likely, the continuation of abuse; a focus on male damagedness alone preserves the ideology of male unaccountability. However, evidence reviewed here suggests that most traditional psychiatric services fail to acknowledge the impact of inequalities on men's mental health as comprehensively as they fail to acknowledge the impact of these inequalities on the mental health of women. This is a significant problem, and we suggest ways that a gendered analysis of masculinity can be used to help address this deficit. This analysis is used to develop a map of men's mental health that not only accommodates traditional categories of mental health difficulty, but other important consequences of the close association between masculinity and sexuality inequality, especially the use of violence and the capacity to do harm. This analytical framework also invites consideration of the invisibility of male distress, the disallowing and desensitizing of ‘vulnerability, and their submersion in a kind of psychology of entitlement. Finally, we consider the implications of this mapping exercise for mental health services and for working with men.     

国外心理健康服务及其启示

在回顾了美国、瑞典等国家心理健康服务概况的基础上提出了以下启示：1．中国心理健康服务体系应以构建和谐社会理论为基础;2．在心理服务的教育与培训中,应当尽量兼顾普及知识与提高专业化水平两个目标;3．政府应当大力支持社区心理健康服务以及包含各种社区可用资源的综合性社区服务;4．中国心理健康服务必须从本国文化与国情出发,因此还需要更多这方面的文献总结与实际诃查工作;5．心理健康服务应当全面而有区别地实施予心理健康水平不同的人群。     

心理健康培训对医护人员心理健康服务的影响

为探讨医护人员心理健康培训现状以及对心理健康服务的影响,采用《医护人员心理健康教育培训问卷》与《心理健康服务行为量表》对664名医护人员进行问卷调查。结果发现,分别有91.6%、65.2%的医护人员学习过心理健康相关课程或接受过相关培训,70.3%通过科普宣传途径学习心理健康知识;心理健康教育和培训正向预测心理健康服务,能够增加8.5%解释变异量。因此,医护人员接受心理健康教育与培训的内容和途径较为单一,对医护人员加强心理健康相关教育培训,可以增加其心理健康服务。     

Religious Service Attendance Aids Coping by Providing a Sense of Continuity: A Test of the Stress‐Support Matching Hypothesis Using Mental Health Outcome Measures

We propose that religious service attendance (RSA) serves as a coping resource by providing a sense of continuity. As a source of continuity, and per the stress‐support matching hypothesis, RSA should consistently buffer the negative mental well‐being impacts of stressors related to discontinuity—the disruption of regular routines and relationships. Most, but not all, of the relevant previous studies we reviewed found that RSA served as an effective buffer for the negative mental health impacts of discontinuity stressors (such as unemployment, terminated relationships, etc.). This variability in previous findings warranted a formal exploration of the relationship between RSA and specific stressors. To that end, we conducted a series of OLS regression path analyses on a sample of Americans age 40 and older (N = 2,579). RSA was found to consistently buffer the negative impact of discontinuity stressors on mental well‐being but failed to do so for other stressors. Overall, our observations are (a) consistent with the stress‐support matching hypothesis, (b) suggest that RSA is particularly effective for reducing the negative impacts of discontinuity stressors, and (c) found no instance in which RSA exacerbated (i.e., made more severe) the effects of life event stressors on mental well‐being.     

Women,Mental Health,and Managed Care

Abstract

Managed care has changed the way that mental health care is provided. These insurers manage such factors as length and type of therapy made available, access to therapy, and level of payment for therapy. Women, as the majority of those insured by managed care and as consumers of mental healthcare, are differentially affected by these changes.     

Spirituality and Health Outcomes in the Elderly

The purpose of this mail survey was to examine the relationship of attitudinal and behavioral measures of spirituality to physical and mental health outcomes in a sample of elderly community residents. Frequency of prayer, importance of faith, and reliance on religion for their coping were compared for their association with eight categories of physical and mental health. All three measures, prayer, faith and religious coping, correlated strongly with positive mental health, but not with the other seven physical health categories. Multiple regression analyses indicated importance of one's faith had the strongest association with positive mental health, even after controlling for the effect of other significant variables, age and education. The behavioral measure of prayer was a component of importance of faith to mental health, with no independent impact. This study highlights attitudes rather than practices, as the stronger spiritual variables related to mental health in the elderly.     

Relationship Between Private Religious Activity and Physical Functioning in Older Adults

This study sought to further understand the relationship between physical functioning and use of private religious activity in older adults. Subjects were age 65 or older from urban and rural counties in North Carolina who participated in the Duke University Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (Duke/EPESE). A total of 3,851 subjects responded to a question that inquired about their use of prayer, meditation, or Bible reading in 1986. Their response was correlated to number of impairments in activities of daily living (ADLs) (n = 3,791). Subjects who indicated use of private religious activity either dailyor neverhad the greatest number of impairments. Those who prayed or meditated one time per weekhad the least number of impairments. This cross-sectional finding is explained in terms of both changes in private religious activity in response to increasing physical disability and changes in physical disability in response to private religious activity. Previous research has found that prayer is often used as an effective coping mechanism with various sicknesses and chronic conditions. Further studies are needed to examine older individuals' health over time and evaluate their use of private religious activity to see its impact over time on physical disability.     

Prevalence,Predictors, and Implications of Religious/Spiritual Struggles Among Muslims

The current investigation explored prevalence, predictors, and psychological implications of religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles among an Israeli‐Palestinian, Muslim sample. R/s struggle was assessed by the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (Exline et al. 2014), a newly developed scale that assesses a wide array of r/s struggles. Factor analysis of the scale in this study revealed five factors of struggle: Divine and Doubt, Punitive Entities, Interpersonal, Moral, and Ultimate Meaning. Of the 139 Muslim participants, between 1.4 percent and 40.2 percent experienced various r/s struggles. Positive God image and fundamentalism predicted lower levels of struggle, whereas negative God image and universality predicted higher levels of struggle. After controlling for religious variables, we found that both depressive symptoms and generalized anxiety were predicted by Punitive Entities and Ultimate Meaning struggles, while satisfaction with life was predicted by Interpersonal struggle. Possible explanations and implications of the findings are offered, and the limitations of the study are discussed.     

Both Ethnic and Religious: Explaining Employment Penalties Across 14 Ethno‐Religious Groups in the United Kingdom

This article uses the case of the probability of being in employment among different ethno‐religious groups in Britain over a period of 12 years (2002–2013) to illustrate how different degrees of labor market penalty in the United Kingdom are highly associated with the different processes of racialization they undergo in the United Kingdom. It is argued that what matters in producing the observed inequalities in the United Kingdom is the inescapable centrality of “color” (mainly blackness) and “culture” (particularly being Muslim) and the way different Muslim and black groups have been racialized. The findings of this study leave little doubt that there is a black and a Muslim penalty in the labor market, but at the same time it suggest that these penalties are not fixed but tend to vary in extent and nature.     

目前国内常用心理健康量表的回顾与反思

对国内近10多年来常被用于评鉴心理健康的7大类量表的分析结果表明,我国常用心理健康评估工具具有逐年增加、从单纯引进转向创造性地自编、自编量表的内容从学习与人格向多领域延伸、自编量表的方法从不完全到完全的特点。已编制出一些信效度较高的量表,但是仍存在一些问题。存在的主要问题是量表的信效度较低、自编量表有低水平重复现象、测量积极心理的量表少。     

中西方关于心理健康标准问题的探讨及对我们的启示

分析了国内外学者在制定心理健康标准时所作的探讨,提出了适应与发展应是心理健康考察的基本对象,对心理健康的评估应是对心理机能的评估,我国在制定心理健康标准时应借鉴西方的有关理论和经验。     

Adolescent Satisfaction with School-Based Mental Health Services

Examining adolescents' satisfaction with mental health services is an important program evaluation activity. Their perceptions of whether services were beneficial and resulted in improved functioning are indices of treatment quality. Assessment of adolescent satisfaction with school-based mental health programs has been limited. In our study, adolescents receiving services from a School Mental Health Program (SMHP) completed satisfaction surveys. Participants were predominantly minority youth residing in an urban area. Results indicated that students were highly satisfied with their mental health services. Students valued the therapeutic relationship, catharsis associated with therapy, and skills they learned during therapy. Several factors influenced satisfaction ratings including clinician training and availability.     

责任意识及其培养:从心理健康的视角来看

文章从心理健康的视角出发,认为责任意识是个体心理健康的内在要求,是构成心理健康标准的重要维度;强调责任意识的培养是心理健康教育的一个基本主题,它具体包括责任行为、责任认知和责任情感的培养三个方面。     

Counseling and Mental Health Care in Palestine

The authors provide a brief overview of counseling and mental health care in Palestine, including their history and a summary of their current status. Finally, a discussion is presented of future trends in the development of the profession with regard to recent changes in the region.