VCU’s Daniel Gutierrez receives $3 million grant to train mental health professionals worldwide on spiritually competent care

By Sian Wilkerson

With support from a new three-year, $3 million grant, Virginia Commonwealth University's Daniel Gutierrez and a multi-institutional team of researchers, educators and clinicians are working to help mental health professionals provide spiritually competent care for clients around the globe.

"The long-term goal is to make spiritual and religious competence a routine part of ethical, culturally responsive, whole-person mental health care," said Gutierrez, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Counseling and Special Education in the School of Education.

Mental health often connects closely to spirituality, religion and concepts of identity, community and meaning, but Gutierrez noted that clinicians often receive little training in how to appropriately address this overlap. In collaboration with international partners and bolstered by the new grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Gutierrez is leading a project designed to address this gap.

Combining two connected initiatives, the project aims to help mental health professionals develop the foundation needed to engage with clients' spiritual, religious, secular and existential concerns respectfully and effectively.

• The first initiative - Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) - will create a foundational online training program to provide clinicians with the tools and knowledge to ask appropriate questions about spirituality and religion, examine their own assumptions and understand when consultation, collaboration or referral may be needed.
• The second initiative - Spiritual Psychotherapy for Inpatient, Residential and Intensive Treatment (SPIRIT) - will prepare clinicians in acute psychiatric settings to help patients explore how their beliefs, practices, relationships and experiences may relate to feelings of well-being or distress.

Through these efforts, the project "seeks to move the field away from spiritually avoidant care in which clinicians ignore or feel unprepared to address an important dimension in people's lives," Gutierrez said.

This doesn't mean "making psychotherapy religious, or encouraging clinicians to promote particular beliefs," he noted. "Spiritual competence applies across the full spectrum of worldviews, including people who identify as religious, spiritual, secular, atheist or agnostic. It also requires clinicians to recognize that spirituality and religion can be sources of both healing and harm."

Led by Gutierrez, the team includes Joseph Currier, Ph.D., with the University of South Alabama; Michelle Pearce, Ph.D., with the University of Maryland, Baltimore; Kenneth I. Pargament, Ph.D., with Bowling Green State University; Nicole Silverio, Ph.D., with the University of South Carolina; and David Rosmarin, Ph.D., with Harvard Medical School and McClean Hospital.

To adapt the programs across multiple languages and cultures, the team will work with international partners in countries and territories including Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark. Across both initiatives, the international teams will revise the programs for their settings, pilot and refine the adapted materials and then conduct larger cultural adaptation trials.

Ultimately, Gutierrez said, "the project's guiding mission is to promote human flourishing and reduce suffering by increasing the number of mental health professionals around the world who can attend competently to the spiritual and religious dimensions of suffering, healing, recovery and transformation."

Gutierrez, a licensed professional counselor, joined VCU in 2022 and has emerged as a leading voice in community mental health. In 2025, he was named a fellow of the American Counseling Association, a lifetime achievement award recognizing his contributions to the field through innovative research and leadership. At VCU, he directs the STAR Labs - focusing on Socially Transformative Applied Research - in the School of Education.