Abstract
This study explores the spiritual and religious beliefs of eight African-Caribbean clients who were engaged in psychotherapy. Information was gathered on the conceptualisation of spiritual and religious issues, the ways in which spiritual and religious issues were engaged with or not engaged with, the impact of this engagement/non engagement on the therapeutic process, spiritual and religious coping and the utilisation of therapeutic services. Interpretative phenomenological analysis of open-ended interview responses revealed spiritual and religious beliefs impacted implicitly and explicitly on therapy, compromising the ways in which therapeutic services were utilised. This highlighted the emic-etic debate in multicultural psychotherapy, lending support to recent calls for ethnic specific mental health services. The utility of spiritual and religious coping highlights the call for the integration of spiritual and religious values in psychotherapy.