Psychotherapy, Vol 63(2), Jun 2026, 145-151; doi:10.1037/pst0000613
Integrating spirituality and religiousness (S/R) into mental health (MH) treatment aligns with our ethics codes and professional guidelines, and it can promote therapeutic outcomes. There is emerging evidence among samples of professional clinicians and graduate students that the Spirituality Competency Training in MH curriculum (SCT-MH; Pearce et al., 2019) may address the dearth of training in this intersection. However, SCT-MH needs to be assessed among undergraduates to support vocational development and those who pursue graduate school or bachelor-level mental health work. In this exploratory pedagogical study, we used a series of repeated measures analyses of variance to assess undergraduate students’ (N = 39) attitudes toward a revised version of the Attitudes subscale of the S/R integration into MH Scale (Oxhandler & Parrish, 2016), the Social Justice Scale (SJS; Torres-Harding et al., 2012), and single-item scales focused on pursuing MH-focused work postdegree across teaching-as-usual and SCT-MH curricula. During teaching-as-usual, there were no significant increases in attitude scores regarding S/R integration (p = .25) or SJS (p = .4). However, there were significant increases in attitudes toward S/R integration (p p p = .68) or vocationally (p = .05) increase. While not causal, these increases during SCT-MH regarding attitudes toward S/R MH integration and social justice attitudes and behaviors are noteworthy. Further extension using vocational assessment, longitudinal and experimental designs, and diverse multisite samples are needed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)