Educational Resources of Psychiatry Residency about Spirituality in Iran: A Qualitative Study

Many psychiatric studies increasingly have focused on the spirituality and the concepts related to it are educated by many universities around the world. In spite of the activities for removing the available defects in this field in Iran, but there is not any clear picture about what subjects of spirituality should be read by medical residents. The aim of the present study is responding to this question in the field of psychiatriy.
In this study, the Educational resources of psychiatry residency were analyzed by using of the analyzing the inductive qualitative content method. The considered resources were final board exam psychiatric reference textbooks in 2014, the published articles in the Iranian journals in the field of education over the past 10 years as well as the articles from the foreign journals which have been used in the this field over the past 20 years.
A total of 153 paragraphs and 9 tables in the reference textbooks and 37 articles in the journals were available for spirituality and its related issues. In the qualitative analysis of the texts, results were classified into the 5 groups and 20 subgroups. The themes were: fundamental perspective to spirituality, to need spirituality in the difficulties, spirituality in the treatment, spirituality as mediator, and negative spirituality.
The subject of spirituality in psychiatric has been considered in the relatively high volume of the resources of the psychiatric board exam in Iran. Therefore, it shows the importance of this issue; however, the volume is small in comparison with the total volume of the references. In addition, due to its dispersal and concealment among the other learning subjects, its education and functionality faces to difficulties.