PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS
Introduction by H. Steven Moffic, MD
Recently, my colleague Parameshwaran Ramakrishnan suggested a joint column on spiritual psychiatry, based on a particularly worrisome global psychiatry news item. The result follows here. Perhaps unexpectedly, but serendipitously and consistently, it seems to complement the recent excellent Psychiatric Times November 6, 2025, column of Vincenzo Di Nicola, titled “The Spiritual Determinants of Health and Mental Health.” Does this confluence suggest any fledging movement forward to the spiritual aspects of psychiatry?
Although apparently rare, there have been recent reports of radicalization among medical professionals around the world, including one article from the November 10, 2025, Times of India titled, “Inside India’s ‘white-collar terror’ network: the 5 doctors under scanner in multi-site module.”1 These examples elicit our psychiatric and spiritual question of how medical healers sometimes lose their moral and ethical way. Historically, one well-known example is the radicalization of physicians in the Nazi regime to breaking their Hippocrates Oath to “do no harm” by participating in the killing of individuals with severe mental illness, forced painful experimentation on non-Aryans, and rejection of Jewish colleagues.2
At its essence, such examples seem to add to the occasional calls for the development of a focused spiritual approach and subspecialty that could be called “spiritual psychiatry.”3 Though at times, it is added as a fourth area to our bio-psycho-social model, should it be done so routinely? If so, then what defines spiritual psychiatry? Most definitions of spirituality mention a feeling of connection to something greater than oneself in the meaning and purpose of life. When psychiatry is connected to the spiritual, that basic purpose is to help patients with what are called mental disorders. In recent times, that has expanded to positive mental health in what is called lifestyle psychiatry.
Spiritual psychiatry can be carved out and extend the general development of the connections between religion and psychiatry, but recognizing that spirituality is personal and may at times be separate from formal religion. The personal value basis allows that some spiritual beliefs will be destructive ones, as in radicalization.
Clinicians trained in this approach would be particularly qualified to:
Interpret scriptures across religious traditions. This knowledge would use evidence-based empathic understanding rather than dogmatic projection.Bring this spiritual-psychiatric literacy into public communities. Such communities would include various religious congregations, other community organizations, and media. The goals would be to help reduce interfaith misunderstanding and our inborn tendency to fear the other, causing what could be called the social psychopathologies like Buddhist-Phobia, Christian-Phobia, Hindu-Phobia, Jewish Phobia/Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and so on.Teach medical students and residents how to study the self in terms of what can be called the soul. Using the same disciplined, evidence-based methodology that we use to study the mind, we can consider what may be “Divine” (the traditional chaplains’ “Principle of Healing”) as the transcendental aspect of the soul.Incorporate a query about what gives any given patient the most meaning in life. Although this question can be a routine item in any patient evaluation, as Moffic incorporated when his time for a medication follow-up was down to 10 minutes, it may add particular depth and relevance to our ever-decreasing, business-controlled time with patients.Collaboration between psychiatry and pastoral caregivers to help clinicians recover meaning and purpose of being a psychiatrist, a “Healer of the Soul.” Ethics rounds, reflective supervision, and spiritually integrated psychotherapy can nurture the empathic awareness that can counter ideological rigidity. Concerned colleagues can also try to empathically and compassionately monitor and intervene early in the radicalization process, such as when colleagues refuse to refer to others for political reasons, as has happened in relation to the war in Gaza.
Such a spiritual psychiatry can help improve patient care.4 It would also enhance appreciation of our ethical and empathic foundation. As such, it can even help to reduce our increasing moral injuries.
Dr Ramakrishnan specializes in spiritual psychiatry and is currently completing his child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the Tower Health, Drexel University program. He holds a Master of Divinity (MDiv) from Harvard Divinity School, where he developed an inter-religious theological framework of healing, and pursued contemplative neuroscience research in the Harvard Psychiatry Department. To refine his theoretical “Mindfulness-to-Transcendence” framework, which underpins the neuroscientific basis of chaplains’ Empathic Listening care, he joined the PhD program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Dr Ramakrishnan is dedicated to establishing evidence-based Spiritual Psychiatry programs. He advocates for combining rigorous theological education with contemplative psychiatric approaches, believing this is essential for a contemporary social psychiatry that can address societal conflicts and fulfill the word’s true meaning: “Healer of the Soul.
Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.
References
1. Inside India’s ‘white-collar terror’ network: the 5 doctors under scanner in multi-site module. Times of India. November 11, 2025. Accessed November 18, 2025. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/white-collar-terror-exposed-meet-the-5-doctors-linked-to-indias-multi-state-terror-module/articleshow/125245712.cms
2. Lifton RJ. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books; 1986.
3. Ramakrishnan P. ‘You are here’: Locating ’spirituality’ on the map of the current medical world. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2015;28(5):393-401.
4. Sims A. The cure of souls: psychiatric dilemmas. Int Rev Psychiatry. 1999;11(2-3):89-96.