Studies have shown that 96% of Americans believe in God and over 90% pray yet there is relatively little education available for clinicians on how to use spirituality as a tool for healing mental illness, particularly when treating very sick patients. This article illustrates how spiritually oriented group therapy with severely ill women can help to improve mood, affect, motivation, interpersonal bonding, and sense of self, and can succeed in reaching patients and promoting recovery in ways that traditional therapy cannot. Specific modalities including group prayer, yoga breathing, and spiritual readings are described.

Breaking Through the Despair offers both a psychodynamic and a neurophysiologic perspective for understanding how this type of treatment helps patients transcend their mental illness and be able to grasp abstract spiritual concepts, develop a sense of belonging to a caring community, and integrate a new sense of themselves as productive and valued individuals.