All clients should receive culturally competent and compassionate mental health care. Unfortunately, religious and spiritual (R/S) clients remain underserved by mental health professionals, largely due to lack of training. Providing R/S competency training in graduate school is a logical approach toward closing the gap, with professor and supervisor attitudes, knowledge, and skills as essential agents of change regarding the cultural and clinical importance of attending to R/S in psychotherapy. This presentation will describe the instructor’s experience of integrating empirically supported R/S competency training materials into a required doctoral level course. More specifically, the Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) online curriculum was integrated into an advanced psychopathology seminar in an APA accredited PsyD program of study. The presentation will focus on the instructor’s assessment of what went well, and what didn’t go as well, when presenting and discussing R/S competency in mental health treatment in the classroom. In addition to presenting the instructor’s perspective, student experiences of the process will be shared and suggestions for continued integration of R/S competency training in mental health graduate training programs will be considered.
