About the Event:

Join us for this live webinar! Presenters will share ways that spirituality/religion (S/R) can promote strengths and struggles in the context of mental health challenges as well as discuss the process for offering spiritually competent care within mental health service organizations. Attendees will discover ways to collaborate with faith-based organizations in order to provide more holistic and long-term care as well as assess one's own clinical competence at attending to a client's spirituality/religion.

Learning Objectives:

1) Understand ways that spirituality/religion (S/R) promote strengths and struggles in the context of mental health challenges

2) Learn processes to offer spiritually competent care within mental health service organizations

3) Discover ways to collaborate with faith-based organizations to provide more holistic and long-term care that might enhance recovery over time

4) Assess one's own clinical competence when it comes to attending to clients' S/R and identify one action step for further professional development

About the Presenters: 

• Joseph Currier, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at University of South Alabama (USA), licensed psychology, and Clinical Supervisor at Vets Recover A clinical psychologist by training, his research focuses on moral injury and applied psychology of religion/spirituality. He has published 124 peer-reviewed articles in support of these lines of work along with two books, entitled Trauma, Meaning, and Spirituality: Translating Research into Clinical Practice and Addressing Moral Injury in Clinical Practice. His work has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and SAMHSA. He is Principal Investigator of the “Spiritual and Religious Competencies Project,” a JTF-funded grant aimed at catalyzing systemic and cultural changes in mental health fields to train clinicians to attend to peoples’ faith or spirituality. He is an editorial board member with Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Spirituality in Clinical Practice, Traumatology, and Death Studies. He also served as Director of Clinical Training for the Clinical and Counseling Psychology Doctoral Program at USA from 2015-2020 and was a RWFJ Clinical Scholar Fellow from 2018-2021.

• Melissa McKnight, MPH, is the Director of Community Integration with Vets Recover- a non-profit organization committed to transforming the culture of care by removing barriers to care, delivering quality integrated health care, and building a better community through recovery and connection.  Before joining the VRR team, Melissa worked in public health service as the Health Equity Officer at the Mobile County Health Department (2021-2022) and Deputy Health Director at the Jackson County Department of Public Health (2016-2021).  She has been long committed to improving the all persons’ well-being of all using a health equity framework, and through  community-based participatory research. Melissa is the Project Director on the SAMHSA Mental Health Awareness Training grant, providing Mental Health First Aid to Service Members, Veterans, First Responders, and their Families as well as the community at large in Mobile and Baldwin Counties.

• Glen Milstein, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and tenured Associate Professor of Psychology at the City College of New York.  He worked for ten years in psychiatric hospitals, struggling with how to bridge interventions of clinical science to life in community.  He saw the tenacity of religious beliefs and practices both help persons to cope, as well as at times impede clinical care. In order to recognize the borders between lived religion and clinical science, as well as to bridge these borders to facilitate community reintegration, our team developed and implements an adaptive public mental health program of Community Outreach & Professional Engagement (COPE).  A twenty-year program of research has led to peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the Department of Veteran Affairs and the NIMH. COPE has been implemented with community mental health centers, churches, the Red Cross, and the United States Military. Dr. Milstein spent his recent sabbatical in the United Kingdom at the University of Cambridge in a dual position as a Visiting Scholar at the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme in the Faculty of Divinity and as a Visiting Researcher at Darwin College.