Understanding Clinical Chaplaincy Approach to Biomedical Ethics: An Imminent Need and a Challenge

Psychiatrists’ Illustration of Awe in Empathic Listening Assessments: A Pilot Study

“…These mindful observations of one's intrapsychic world provoke self-empathy. Second, using wisdom and self-empathy, the researcher/RP would "zoom out" to mindfully observe how he interacts with the external world, the patient, and the clinical situation [17][18][19]26]. Thus, RP is a participant-researcher in this study.…”

“…Immediately after each patient visit, the EL care interactions were transcribed verbatim by RP using a contemporaneous note-taking methodology [17,18,24]. The granular details that are jotted down are of this psychiatrist/RP's self-reflective observations of his and his patient's speech and behavior, as well as his own intrapsychic processes, such as his thoughts, emotions, internal struggles, past painful memories, and urges that got triggered while listening to the patients' stories [17][18][19]24,25].…”

“…The first author of this paper (RP) is a psychiatrist who was also trained as a Clinical Chaplain in an Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE)-accredited Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE)/Spiritual Care residency program [6]. Clinical chaplains are trained in the art of EL, which is their primary assessment tool in the spiritual care process [17][18][19]. In this study, RP illustrates how EL care can be applied to psychiatric assessment for a better clinical outcome.…”

“…This paper aims to present a systematic assessment of a psychiatrist's emotional experience of awe and non-agency on witnessing the patients' healing transformation during EL interactions with six patients. The objective is to understand how the emotions of awe, and non-agency, which are described to have neural correlates can fit into the current contemplative neuroscience/mindfulness-based framework of EL assessment [17][18][19] and help in advancing evidence-based studies.…”

“…We hypothesize that the emotions of awe and non-agency signify the transcendental (beyond mindfulness) state of mind attained automatically through the EL process, a mindful meditative approach to psychiatric assessment [17][18][19]. In that sense, the experiential and neuroscientific understandings of the transcendental state of mind signified by the emotions of "awe" and non-agency can be built into the current mindfulnessbased framework of the EL assessment process.…”