week 5- Vivianne Lee

     This week's reading "You are here: locating spirituality on the map of the current medical world" by Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan discusses the phenomenological approach to understanding psychopathology and psychiatric diagnosis. It talks about how health care system started incorporating spiritual healers as part of its program and how spirituality, medicine, and religion can be connected as one. The chaplain’s spiritual care process of listening presence is deep and empathetic listening to the patient’s thoughts and feelings. This skill is secondary to chaplain’s ability to be mindfully aware of his/her own ‘self’, thoughts and feelings; mindfulness of another individual’s mental processes is conceptual-ized as ‘trans-personal mindfulness (394). Chaplain's spiritual care helps people in a different and unique way. It helps patients find purpose in their life through their struggles. I believe Chaplains spiritual care can have a huge impact on Western medicine where spiritual care is relatively still considered new. As someone influenced heavily by the Western culture and its idea of Science and how Science is the solution to everything, spiritual care can be a great alternative if medicine fails to cure patients. One question I have is how can something like Chaplains spiritual care be acknowledge and embraced throughout the Western health care system when they are heavily influenced by Science and rather close minded?

patients transcend their emotional disturbances

to connect with their ‘self’ and reach an

ataractic

state of peace. Our understanding and/or definition

of ‘spirituality’ or ‘spiritual care’ may lie in that

‘search’ (for the ‘self’ or the ‘divine’ and the inner

dialogue with it) which helps individuals find

meaning and purpose in their struggles

This article has argued for the phenomenological

approach to understanding psychopathology and psy-

chiatric diagnosis [22,23]. T

he disturbances of ‘self’,

of embodiment, and intersubjective experiences

[24,25

&&

] of a psychiatric patient may be corrected

through chaplain’s spiritual care process, which is

an exercise in establishing reciprocal empathetic and

embodied relationship [4

&&

,17

&

]. Psychiatric patients’

lack of insight [70] that is associated with lack of ‘self’-

experience [70,71], and impairment of their theory of

mind [72

&&

], can arguably be improved by chaplains’

model of spiritual care that imparts skills of self-experi-

ence and intersubjective empathy to their patients.