Spotlight Series: Dr. Michelle Pearce
This week we are highlighting Dr. Michelle Pearce, PI of sub-project 1.
A necessary resource for mental health and religious professionals, Dr. Pearce’s book, Religion and Recovery from PTSD, addresses the contribution religion and spirituality (RS) make to trauma recovery. Many religious texts and practices serve to help those recovering from trauma and these RS components prove complementary to simultaneous clinical treatment for trauma recovery. Importantly, the authors also address where RS can, in some cases, negatively impact recovery. This book reviews the current literature regarding RS’s role in facilitating psychological recovery and provides vignettes to demonstrate recovery in action.
Dr. Pearce and colleagues designed the online Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) program to address the training gap in religious and spiritual (RS) aspects of multiculturalism. Participants showed significantly increased spiritual competency in all measures of competency (i.e., attitudes, knowledge, and skills) upon completion of the course. The results demonstrate that this brief, novel online training can help address the gap between the clinical need and professional requirements for RS competency and the lack of graduate training in RS competencies as an aspect of multiculturalism.
Read the full article here:
Pearce, M.J., Pargament, K.I., Oxhandler, H.K., Vieten, C., & Wong, S. (2020). Novel online training program improves spiritual competencies in mental health care. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 7(3), 145–161.
“Just as some flowers only bloom in the dark, so too, some people require the darkness to bloom and become their best selves.” Loss, pain, and adversity are an inevitable part of the human experience, but these challenging circumstances can offer us opportunities for growth not otherwise possible. Dr. Michelle Pearce joins the CXMH podcast to offer a step-by-step guide for transforming loss and adversity into positive growth and hope.
