Why do we ignore spiritual side of addiction

President Trump has declared the opioid epidemic a national health emergency, addiction experts compare it with the AIDS epidemic, educators grapple with drugs in schools, and parents lie awake at night dreading a 3 a.m. phone call.

Still, the body count rises. There were more than 63,000 drug-related deaths in 2016, up 21 percent from the year before and the biggest one-year rise in three decades.

This may be an opportune time to pause, step back and ask whether we are fully utilizing all the tools at our disposal.

David H. Rosmarin, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Spirituality and Mental Health Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass, posits that spirituality may be one such instrument.

In a December 29 Wall Street Journal article, Mr. Rosmarin wrote that in his first six months as a pre-doctoral psychology intern at McLean Hospital, he was approached by at least 10 patients asking to discuss their problems not in psychological terms but in spiritual ones.

Mr. Rosmarin is not a theologian. He is a practicing Orthodox Jew and clinical scientist. He smilingly credits his yarmulke with conferring an air of authenticity.

Although rarely mentioned in thousands of media reports about the current opioid crisis, the idea of a nexus between spirituality and psychiatry is not new.

Carl Jung called alcoholism “a spiritual thirst ... for wholeness: the union with God.”

In 1950 Jung wrote that a “nodding acquaintance with the theory and pathology of neurosis is totally inadequate, because medical knowledge of this kind is merely information about an illness, but not knowledge of the soul that is ill.”

A crusty former addict of my acquaintance declares that the next doctor who claims to have cured an addict will be the first. He concedes that addicts suffer severe mental distress (“dis-ease”), but favors “soul sickness” to disease.

A prominent local psychiatrist, now deceased, working in the addiction field once confided to me that the medical profession “knows (nothing) about addiction.”

The issue then is whether education, therapy, treatment, needle exchanges, Narcan and the rest merely treat the symptoms of the “disease” while the “soul that is ill” inexorably sinks deeper into John Bunyan’s “slough of despond.”

Mr. Rosmarin cites a 2014 study which concluded that “religion and spirituality have the ability to promote, or damage, mental health.” It urged “an increased awareness of religious matters by practitioners in the mental health field as well as ongoing attention in psychiatric research.”

A 2015 review examining over 3000 scholarly articles for the International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience found a “positive effect” of religion/spirituality on a variety of health outcomes, including: “... lower rates of suicide, less use, abuse, and substance dependence (emphasis added), greater well-being, and reported happiness.”

The hope, meaning, purpose and connection to the divine that a spiritual life provides apparently can serve as a resource to cope with the mental distress that triggers flight into addiction.

McLean Hospital asks incoming psychiatric patients if they wish to discuss spirituality. If yes, they are then asked how is their spirituality relevant to their symptoms and treatment and “the conversation typically takes off from there.”

When nothing is working, what have we got to lose?

“The idea of a nexus between spirituality and psychiatry is not new.” — Gerald McOscar