New BU Research Project Aims to Shift Mental Health Focus Beyond Symptoms to Meaning and Well-Being
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New BU Research Project Aims to Shift Mental Health Focus Beyond Symptoms to Meaning and Well-Being
With multimillion dollar funding from the John Templeton Foundation, initiative will train clinicians to focus more on relational values and clients’ strengths
Steven Sandage wants to change the way mental health care is practiced and studied. A clinical psychologist who teaches at Boston University School of Theology, he believes that mental health care providers can better support their patients by incorporating into their treatment the strengths, community, life purpose, and holistic well-being of those in their care—factors outside the typical scope of the clinical discipline.
Sandage, the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Professor of Psychology of Religion & Theology, and his team recently received a $5.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund an initiative on training psychotherapists to incorporate these ideas and new training and treatment research into their practices. Led by Sandage and Jesse Owen, a professor at the University of Denver, the project will span eight clinical sites across the United States and Ireland. The work started in September and will continue for the next three years.
“We’ve framed [the project] around the question, ‘Does mental health treatment help patients really live more meaningful lives and be more connected to the people around them in their communities?’” says Sandage, research director and staff psychologist at BU’s Albert & Jessie Danielsen Institute. “We know much less about those kinds of effects and outcomes of mental health treatment than we do about the more basic medical model goal of reducing symptoms.”
Over his career, Sandage has integrated his work as a theologian with mental health practices, and sees an opportunity now to improve care by focusing on two key attributes: relational virtues and flourishing.
He describes relational virtues as strengths that help promote resilience and well-being, such as humility, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude. These strengths can allow an individual to establish healthy connections to those around them, says Sandage. Flourishing includes three key dimensions: vitality, meaningful purpose, and authentic social connections. He describes flourishing as part of an assessment for whether or not someone is getting the most out of life, which can be impacted by various systemic factors, like access to resources, community support, and discrimination.
According to Sandage, most clinicians think attending to client flourishing is a good idea, but lack the training to implement it. The project aims to fix that, by providing focused training to clinicians across the eight sites.
The Brink sat down with Sandage to learn more about his work and the impact he hopes to have.
Q&A
With Steven Sandage
The Brink: What do you hope the main impacts of this study will be?
Sandage: It’s multipronged. Overall, we want to try to help change the conversation in mental health care to broaden it beyond simply focusing on clusters of symptoms and diagnoses, and try to also understand people receiving mental health treatment, and the clinicians themselves, as whole people who have strengths, who aspire to a sense of well-being and wholeness in life. For clinicians and therapists, a portion of the project is designed to help fend off the rising rates of burnout. It’s become a major problem in the field, as there’s more demand for services than there are clinicians available. Our theory is also that if clinicians engage with some of these broader parts of life—like strengths, virtues, and well-being—as part of their work, it might ease the burnout we’re seeing.
The Brink: What makes this project different from work that might be happening elsewhere?
Sandage: I think there’s a couple of things. One, we have a lot of multicultural expertise on the project. The more you focus on strengths and well-being, the more you also have to tune into diversity and context. We’re aligning this project with some of the growing work on cultural humility and the multicultural orientation to treatment approaches.
We’ve also got a lot of folks on the team who have training in other disciplines. We’re trying to take a really rich, textured look—bridging connections to other fields like philosophy, theology, and sociology, and trying to draw on their expertise to enrich the ways that we think about the dynamics around relational virtues and flourishing. It’s good for the mental health field to be open to input from other disciplines as well. This interdisciplinary work is a real strength and value of being at Boston University.
The Brink: Can you talk to me a little bit about the past work you’ve done for the Danielsen Institute?
Sandage: We work with other great clinical research labs, and are really trying to understand some of the factors that account for ways relational virtues, spirituality, and cultural factors can positively impact healing and growth. This project builds on past findings that show how the ability to draw on personal strengths to regulate emotions is crucial to these clinical outcomes. We’ve got data to support that, and we’re going to try to develop more of that.
One of the other valuable things that we’ve been able to do in the past is that we’ve brought together diverse clinical researchers across different theoretical orientations, which doesn’t always happen in the mental health field; it can sometimes be polarizing, where psychodynamic clinicians don’t talk to cognitive behavioral clinicians, and vice versa. And so, over the last couple of projects like this, we’ve been really excited about bringing together different researchers.
The Brink: What are the next steps for this project?
Sandage: We’re going to be doing a request for proposals for projects in this area. Most of the grant is for the defined site projects we’re working on together. But we’re also going to put out a call for proposals this next year that’s going to give a lot of graduate students or early career people a chance to apply to get involved in this line of work.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.