The human being's spiritual experiences in a mental healthcare context; their positive and negative meaning and impact on health--a hermeneutic approach.

The study aims at describing different meanings of patients' spiritual experiences and their impact on patients' health in mental healthcare. The different contents of patients' spiritual experiences are often understood by caregivers as the expressions of patients' religious speculation. The study has a hermeneutic approach, inspired by Gadamer. Its theoretical pre-understanding is Caring Science perspective, according to which the human being is a unity of body, psyche and spirit. The sources are 32 stories selected from William James' book (1956) The Varieties of Religious Experience. They are hermeneutically interpreted and discussed in the light of international research on patients' spirituality to gain a deeper understanding. The results are three main themes: (i) the positive meanings of spirituality, (ii) the negative meanings of spirituality and (iii) the both negative and positive meaning of spirituality. Therefore, it is a very important task for mental caregivers to address patients' spiritual dimension to help them adequately.