Wright, L.M. (2005). Spirituality, suffering, and illness: Ideas for Healing. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis.
With increasing evidence that there is a connection between illness, spirituality, and healing, this book, the first to consider suffering and spirituality jointly, provides a non-religious, practical guidebook for dealing with this phenomenon. This holistic assessment tool is an in-depth, step-by-step, practical guide to starting conversations about spirituality with patients and their families in order to encourage healing and diminish or alleviate emotional, physical, and/or spiritual suffering. Key features:
- Provides a model by which nurses and other health professionals can understand the relationship between suffering and spirituality within the context of an illness
- “Conversations for healing” provide a clinical approach and specific questions with which to elicit information regarding suffering and spirituality
- Defines the key ingredients of clinical practices that reduces suffering from illness — creating a healing environment, acknowledging that suffering exists, listening to, witnessing, and validating suffering from illness
- Offers a practical means of eliciting information from the patient and the patient’s family about their spiritual beliefs and then demonstrates how to use those beliefs to help the patient and the family deal with suffering and illness
- Includes numerous clinical examples
- Describes research-based practice and practice-based research as guides for health professionals’ own conduct
- Focuses on “family” rather than solely adults
- Addresses issues such as how spirituality and religion are the same or different, and what are considered spiritual beliefs/practices in daily life