Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health

have been identified as positive factors influencing mental health. Religious faith, for example may impact mental health through generating optimism and hopeful expectations in God's rewards. Among older adults, for example, it has been shown that: 1) religious faith provides hope for change and healing, 2) religious involvement influences well-being by providing social support, and 3) prayer and religious worship affect mental health through the effects of positive emotions (Levin and Chatters, 1998).

In the twenty-first century, religious and spiritual dimensions of culture remain important factors structuring human experience, beliefs, values, behavior, and illness patterns. Sensitivity to the cultural dimensions of religious and spiritual experiences is deemed essential for effective psychiatric treatment. The majority of the world's population relies on complementary and alternative systems of medicine for healing. It follows that in order for a psychiatrist to effectively work with an indigenous healer, he or she must have some understanding of the patient's cultural construction of illness, including the meaning of religious content. Religious cultures are powerful factors in modifying individual attitudes toward life and death, happiness and suffering. The subspecialty of transcultural psychiatry has gained momentum and clinical relevance from an interest in similarities and differences between cultures and the effect of culture on treatment plan. In this view, religion is a "container of culture:" rituals, beliefs, and taboos of religion are profoundly important to the nature and structure of society as vehicles whereby values, attitudes, and beliefs are transmitted from generation to generation (Cox, 1996; Rhi, 2001).

Finally, religion and spiritual issues have been identified as research agendas for the development of DSM-V. Examination of religion in history-taking and cultural formation processes and spirituality as a factor in self-identity, self-care, insight, self-reliance, and resiliency, are being promoted. Research on the similarities and differences between religious and spiritual issues across ethnic and cultural groups is being encouraged, as is research on the transgenerational process of acquisition or transmission of religious and spiritual norms and their impact on diagnosis (Kupfer, First, and Reiger, 2002).

To conclude, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote in 1933:

Among all my patients in the second half of life - that is to say, over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he [sic] had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them had been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook, (p. 229)

While this book is not predicated on regaining a religious outlook, it is my hope that a realization of the richness of possibility inherent in spiritual and creative resources will be a byproduct of reading it. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck addressed