(PS7-97) Examining two pedagogical methods on attitudes towards religiosity within mental health and social justice in an undergraduate course

Integrating spirituality and religiosity (S/R) into mental health (MH) treatment aligns with our ethics codes, professional guidelines, and it can promote therapeutic outcomes. There is emerging evidence among samples of professional clinicians and graduate students that the Spirituality Competency Training in MH curriculum (SCT-MH; Pearce et al., 2019) may address the dearth of training in this intersection. However, SCT-MH needs to be assessed among undergraduates to support vocational development and those who pursue graduate school or bachelor-level mental health work. In this exploratory pedagogical study, we used a series of repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVAs) to assesses undergraduate students’ (N = 39) attitudes towards a revised version of the Attitudes subscale of the S/R Integration into MH Scale (Oxhandler & Parrish, 2016), the Social Justice Scale (Torres-Harding et al., 2012), and single-item scales focused on pursuing MH-focused work post-degree across teaching-as-usual (TAU) and SCT-MH curricula. In TAU, there were no significant increases in attitude scores regarding S/R integration (p = .25) or SJS (p = .4). However, there were significant increases attitudes towards S/R integration (p < .001) and SJS during the SCT-MH curriculum (p < .001). In neither arm did interest single-item scores on pursuing MH graduate school (p = .68) or vocationally (p = .05) increase. These findings extend emerging evidence that SCT-MH increases attitudes towards S/R MH integration and are the first that demonstrate increases in social justice attitudes and behaviors. Further extension using vocational assessment, longitudinal designs, and diverse multi-site samples are needed.