A Conversation With Justin Fannon

What drew you to chaplaincy, and what brought you to Vail Health?

I was drawn to chaplaincy because it sits at the intersection of meaning-making and human healing. I’ve always been someone who wants to understand how people construct their identity (the sense of who we are), and chaplaincy gave me a direct, relational context to engage that in real time.

What brought me to Vail Health was the unique opportunity to learn and integrate my Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health (CCSH) Fellowship, connected to Emory Healthcare, at Vail Health’s Precourt Healing Center. A psychiatric context like the Precourt Healing Center challenges me to grow, think, and develop my own voice. There was something about this integrative setting that felt aligned in the right way. We approach care as communally informed, holistic, and open to each individual’s unique spirituality.

Can you share a snapshot of your background and training?

I began my academic journey at Emory & Henry University, where I earned undergraduate degrees in Business Administration and Religious Studies. During that time, I developed an interest in how people find meaning and navigate life’s challenges, which led me to pursue further training in psychology. I went on to complete post-graduate training in Experimental Psychology at Georgia State University.

I continued my education at Emory University, earning my Master of Divinity, where I began focusing more directly on spiritual care in clinical settings. During that time, I also worked as a research assistant on two book projects focused on trauma and spiritual care, which deepened my interest in how language, meaning, and psychological experience influence clinical care. Through my chaplaincy training, I gained clinical experience across multiple environments, including emergency medicine, acute care, orthopedics, and behavioral health.

Alongside my academic and clinical training, I pursued ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and previously worked as a minister of social work with the unhoused population in Atlanta, GA. Open and affirming theology is central to my beliefs and values in the world.

I am currently completing a chaplaincy fellowship, focusing on integrating spiritual care into behavioral health treatment, while also working as a lab coordinator at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. In this role, I am involved in psychodynamic research focused on spirituality, attachment, and identity, particularly how individuals use spiritual beliefs to reorganize themselves in recovery. My work has contributed to multiple conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications, with research examining spiritual attachment and its role in addiction recovery.

What does your role look like day to day at the Precourt Healing Center?

A typical day involves meeting with patients in a dynamic inpatient setting. My role is to assess and engage patients’ spiritual and existential frameworks in a way that’s clinically relevant to their needs. Sometimes that looks like helping someone reconnect with a stabilizing belief system; other times it’s working through spiritual conflict, loss of meaning, or identity disruption that’s affecting their thriving.

I also work closely with the interdisciplinary team, helping translate spiritual language into actionable information that informs a person’s treatment. That might mean offering insight into how a patient’s belief system is supporting their recovery, or where it might be reinforcing patterns that contribute to their harm.

How does spiritual support complement inpatient behavioral health care?

I often say that spiritual care isn’t here to treat symptoms but instead help patients express and integrate their lived experience.

In inpatient settings, people are usually in crisis. Clinical care stabilizes symptoms, but it doesn’t always address the deeper question of “Who am I now, and what holds me together?” Spiritual care often helps patients reconnect with, or critically rework, their belief systems in ways that support their recovery. For some, that means drawing on a sense of purpose, community, or transcendence that helps regulate them. For others, it means working through spiritual distress, feelings of abandonment, guilt, or loss of meaning that are actively causing harm.

It also adds another layer to treatment by identifying when spirituality functions as a resource rather than reinforcing maladaptive patterns. Not all spirituality is helpful, and part of the role is discerning how one’s beliefs and experience are operating for a patient, and integrating that into the broader treatment plan.

Vail Health’s chaplains serve people of all faith traditions and those with no religious affiliation. How do you approach care across such a wide range of beliefs and backgrounds?

The central value of chaplaincy is that I’m not here to represent any single belief system. Instead, I’m here to understand how someone’s system of meaning is influencing their experience, whatever form it takes. I also try to be aware of my own framework and keep it in the background. The goal isn’t to guide someone toward a particular perspective; it’s to help them access whatever is most grounding and authentic for them.

At Vail Health, that means approaching each patient with curiosity rather than assumption. Some people draw from a specific religious tradition, others from something more personal or undefined, and some don’t identify with spirituality at all. However, everyone still has a way of making sense of their experience.

Practically, I focus on how their beliefs, or non-beliefs, are functioning. Are they a source of stability, nurturance, connection, or meaning? Or are they tied up with guilt, fear, or a sense of disconnection? Once I understand that, I can meet them where they are, whether that means supporting an existing framework, helping them work through spiritual struggle, or just creating a safe, affirming space to process. At the end of the day, it’s less about specific beliefs and more about building a relationship where someone feels understood. Once that’s there, the rest of the work tends to follow.

How do you see the role of spiritual care evolving in behavioral health treatment?

I think spiritual care in behavioral health is moving from being peripheral to becoming more explicitly integrated into how we understand and treat patients.

Historically, spirituality has been either overlooked or treated as optional, nice-to-have, but not essential. What I’m seeing, and where I think things are going, is a shift toward recognizing spirituality as a meaningful psychological variable, something that actively shapes identity, coping, attachment, and recovery trajectories.

In practical terms, that means spiritual care becoming more embedded in interdisciplinary treatment. For example, understanding a patient’s spiritual framework can clarify how they make meaning of suffering, how they relate to dependence or control, and even how they engage treatment as a whole.

I also think there’s going to be more differentiation within spiritual care itself. Not all spirituality is beneficial, and the field is starting to take more seriously the idea of spiritual distress, moral injury, and maladaptive belief systems. Chaplains and clinicians will need to be more precise, not just in supporting spirituality, but in assessing how it’s functioning psychologically.

The Vail Health Frechette Chapel and Spiritual Services are supported by philanthropy.