Representações sociais sobre religião e espiritualidade

RESUMO Objetivo: apreender as representações sociais acerca dos conceitos de espiritualidade e religião de docentes da área da saúde. Método: estudo exploratório e descritivo, com abordagem qualitativa, do qual participaram 25 docentes. Para a coleta de dados foram utilizados os seguintes instrumentos: questionário de identificação do perfil dos participantes; questionário de livre associação, tendo como palavras indutoras religião e espiritualidade, e um roteiro de entrevista baseado na escala FICAProfissional de Puchalski. Resultados: as representações acerca de religião e espiritualidade, para os docentes, são forjadas em torno da fé em Deus e lhes confere sentido e propósito para lidar com os desafios do viver pessoal e profissional. Conclusão: na esfera profissional há barreiras que precisam ser ultrapassadas com vistas a um cuidado integral. Para isso é imprescindível a incorporação da espiritualidade no processo nos currículos dos cursos da área da saúde.

Implications of spiritual experiences to the understanding of mind-brain relationship

OBJECTIVE

While there has been a large increase in scientific studies on spirituality, there has been too few of studies of the core of spirituality: spiritual experiences (SE), which often involve altered states of consciousness, reports of anomalous experiences and of consciousness beyond the body. This paper argues that SE, although usually neglected in debates regarding mind-brain relationship (MBR), may provide the much needed enlargement of the empirical basis for advancing the understanding of the MBR.

METHODS

This paper briefly presents and discusses recent scientific investigations on some types of SE (meditative states, end of life and near death experiences, mediumship and alleged memories of previous lives) and their implications to MBR.

RESULTS

Neurofunctional studies of SE have shown that they are related to but not necessarily caused by complex functional patterns in several brain areas. The study of meditative states, as voluntarily induced mind states that influence brain states has been a privileged venue to investigate top-down (mind over brain) causation. End of life and near death experiences offer cases of unexpected adequate mental function under severe brain damage and/or dysfunction. Scientific investigations of several types of SE have provided evidence against materialistic reductionist views of mind.

CONCLUSIONS

The recent trend to scientifically investigate SE has already produced interesting and thought-provoking findings that deserve careful further exploration. Because of their potential implication, these findings may also contribute to the understanding of MBR, which remains an important, yet poorly explored way to investigate human nature.

Assessing clinical implications of spiritual experiences

Since spiritual experiences (SE) very often resemble dissociative and psychotic symptoms, there is a risk of misdiagnosis in both directions: labeling a healthy SE as a mental disorder or taking a mental disorder as an SE. There is a scarcity of well-controlled studies on this subject. The paper provides a brief overview of studies on dissociative and psychotic experiences in the non-clinical population, especially those occurring in spiritual populations. At the end, some guidelines are proposed to help clinical reasoning when making the differential diagnosis between healthy SE with psychotic and dissociative experiences and mental disorders that may resemble SE.