![]() Richard Bentall’s examination of the issue in his 2003 edition of Madness Explained makes the problem clear. I will briefly revisit the picture briefly here. It is thankfully being increasingly accepted that trauma leads to experiences that are then labelled psychotic which need to be managed and integrated not simply by drugs, which may sometimes be a temporary fix at best, but by therapeutic relationships within an accepting social context, something I have already explored at some length on this blog. It is taking much longer to acknowledge that extremes of mental disturbance may not be madness at all in many if not most cases. Trauma and its effects took a long time to gain acceptance, as the last post explored. ![]() I began by looking back at the history of the way the effects of trauma have been treated. We need to understand how much of an uphill battle it is going to be to get the spiritual dimensions of the experiences currently labelled psychosis accepted in mainstream psychiatry and psychology. So, it seemed important to flag the book up at this point.īefore I go into more detail I need to place its thesis in perspective. ![]() Even so, much of it is clearly derived from careful observation and direct experience, and goes a long way towards defining what look convincingly like spiritual manifestations within mental disturbances which are currently dismissed as mere madness. It has echoes for me of Hillman’s The Soul’s Code in that it combines deep insights with what read like wild flights of fancy and carefully substantiated accounts of concrete experience with vague waves at unspecified bodies of invisible evidence. This is something I will have to investigate further. It was published in 1991 at a less than universally receptive time so it is hard to determine from the book itself how far things might have moved on since. Recently I came across a second hand copy of Christina and Stanislav Grof’s The Stormy Search for the Self: understanding and living with spiritual emergency. Isabel Clarke’s Spirituality & Psychosis left me frustrated by its lack of such detail. Readers of this blog will remember that I was struggling recently to find more detailed discussion of the possibility that some severe mental disturbances have spiritual aspects. ![]() I am repeating my preamble to the first post to clarify the eventual focus of this sequence. Given the recent post taking another look at psychosis and trauma, it seemed worthwhile republishing this sequence. ![]()
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