Spirituality and Mental Health Care: Rediscovering a ‘Forgotten’ Dimension By John Swinton. London: Jessica Kingsley. 2001. 221 pp. £15.95 (pb). ISBN: 1-85302-804-5.

The author of this timely study, who comes from a background in psychiatric nursing and hospital chaplaincy, is currently a lecturer in practical theology at Aberdeen. His achievement is to have written a practical and, in part, evidence-based study of the spiritual aspects of psychiatric practice, both as they are and as they might become.

Daringly, he begins by attempting to define spirituality. He points out that while institutional religion is in decline, all of us, whether enjoying mental health or not, remain centrally concerned (implicitly or explicitly) with meaning, value, transcendence, connecting with others and becoming — ‘discovering who we really are’. Merely to explain away these needs psychologically is to distort and impoverish them. Further, and as the rest of the book shows, ‘spirituality can… be studied scientifically’. He adds (and this is a significant and recurring theme), ‘although our understandings of science may have to alter to accommodate for the new perspectives that spirituality brings to it’.

He teases out the historical and doctrinal reasons why psychiatrists have tended to neglect or pathologise the spiritual, while acknowledging that within our College ignorance of the impact of the religious dimension on our patients ‘is a recognised educational issue’. A useful literature survey is followed by a description of the author's study into the ‘lived experience of spirituality in the context of depression’. The somewhat unusual though appropriate methodology is carefully described. The results indicate not only the deep significance to patients of meaning and value, but also provide moving insights into ways of intervening therapeutically, whether or not we share the patient's world view.

A full discussion of how the different disciplines within mental health might collaboratively both assess and answer spiritual need leads to the claim that spiritual care is in part a form of practical wisdom, which is ‘as much a way of being as a way of acting’.

Whatever our own beliefs, we can no longer afford to neglect the spiritual dimension of our patients' suffering. This information-rich and clearly written book charts relatively unknown territory with which we urgently need to become much more familiar.