Faith in the Therapy Room: A Qualitative Study of Canadian Immigrant Clients' Untold Stories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Immigration to Canada brings cultural diversity, but also stressors and challenges that impact mental well-being. Spirituality recognizes the profound significance of relational knowing, manifesting in external appreciation for meaningful experiences with others that provide purpose. Despite the importance of faith in many immigrants' lives, mental health professionals often overlook spiritual and religious convictions. This descriptive qualitative study addressed this gap by conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 immigrant clients of faith in a diverse Canadian province. Purposive and snowball sampling were used for participant recruitment. NVivo 12 software facilitated efficient data management and analysis, and Braun and Clarke's (2006) six-phase framework for thematic analysis identified nine overarching themes: (1) Using Faith as a Coping Strategy, (2) Relationship with Faith Changed Post-Migration, (3) Invalidation of Racism in Practice, (4) Counselors' Failure to Address Faith, (5) Faith as a "Free-Flowing" Process, (6) Cultural Stigma Surrounding Mental Illness, (7) Establishing a Strong Therapeutic Relationship, (8) Faith and Trauma, and (9) Barriers to Mental Health Help-Seeking. These findings informed the development of the Free-Flowing Model of Faith (FFMF) framework, emphasizing the importance of cultural humility and faith-inclusive care. This study highlights the need for integrating faith in mental health services to better support immigrant communities. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".