Spiritual Care Therapeutics for the End of Life

This chapter presents an overview of a variety of approaches to spiritual care that include therapeutics that encourage intrapersonal meaning (i.e. Dignity Therapy, spiritual life review), interpersonal meaning (i.e. forgiveness therapy, altruism), and transpersonal meaning (i.e. religion, prayer, nature). Given there are many approaches to meaning making, these selected therapeutics simply provide a spiritual care sampler. After reviewing some principles of spiritual care, this chapter discusses each of these therapeutics by describing it, presenting empirical evidence about it, and making practical suggestions for implementing it in the context of palliative care.