Brian Spittles - Psychosis, Psychiatry and Psychospiritual Considerations: Engaging and Better Understanding the Madness and Spiritual Emergence Nexus

As a consultant clinical psychologist and sangoma (South African shaman) with a PhD on sangoma trance states, my clinical work within indigenous communities often directly challenges me in regard to the complex relationship of psychosis and psychospiritual states. In that spirit, I appreciate how Brian Spittles not only dismantles epistemological definitions of psychosis, but also, with subtle finesse, elucidates the dynamics of psychospiritual approaches. For example, his work on Tibetan Buddhist spirit possession is exquisite. And don't skip the appendices, as they hold scintillating treasures. Such a rich contribution, worth savouring, if this topic is meaningful to you.

Dr Ingo Lambrecht is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, and author of Sangoma Trance States (2014)

Fearlessly, and with the authority that comes from an impeccable, thoughtful literature review, Dr. Spittles challenges psychiatry to accept a broader view of human experience. He reflects on ancient wisdom traditions that describe, validate, and draw benefit from extraordinary states of consciousness. He makes the case that psychiatry must open its doors and accept this wisdom. In many circumstances, what has been categorically perceived as psychosis can be understand as a beneficial psychospiritual transformation that needs to be nurtured, and not medicated or labelled as mental illness.

Dr Emma Bragdon is a transpersonal psychologist, founder and Executive Director of Integrative Mental Health for You, and the author of A Sourcebook for Helping People in Spiritual Emergency (2006)

This timely, progressive book questions the validity of psychiatry's materialistic concept of psychosis and raises the pertinent issue of what it means to be fully human. Could interventions based on dominant psychiatric assumptions that underpin current conceptualisations be limiting a natural healing process which is trying to emerge? Spittles suggested feasibility of psychospiritual research in psychiatry establishes a broader investigative scope, inclusive of metaphysical and cross-cultural lenses, and offers a more productive approach than psychiatry's claim that psychosis is essentially incomprehensible. This book opens the way for further investigative research and proposes a hopeful and much needed new paradigm of medical holism.

Katie Mottram is an author, Campaign Founder, and Inaugural Director of the International Spiritual Emergence Network

Like a skilful conductor leading a very large orchestra, the author has done a masterful job drawing together and harmonizing a vast range of at times seemingly incompatible information and concepts with engaging, informative, and enlightening results. I heartily endorse his key assertion: psychiatry must transcend its current fixation with biology and pathology and rebuild itself upon bona fide, rigorously researched psychospiritual foundations if it is to ever justify calling itself a profession of soul doctors. The challenges this book articulates so well not only invite but should command the attention of everyone with a serious interest in these issues.

John Watkins is a mental health counsellor, researcher, and educator, and is the author of Hearing Voices (1998), Healing Schizophrenia (2006), and Unshrinking Psychosis (2010)

This book is a deep dive into what Foucault called the Reason-Madness nexus, which constitutes a core dialogical dimension of the originality of western culture as reflected in its art and its spirituality. However, this creativity wellspring of active dialogue has been drying up since the Age of Reason. Even in the mental health field, where diagnosis and treatment of psychosis directly confronts the psychiatrist with complex issues, the language of psychiatry has been reduced to a monologue of reason about madness. In this light, Dr. Spittles book offers a reservoir of mental health vitality to those who are restricted by routine rationalism.

Professor David Lukoff is a licensed psychologist, author of 80 articles, and co-author of the DSM-4 and DSM-5 Religious or Spiritual Problem category

Dr Spittles has made an indispensable contribution to a broader understanding of the perennial experience of extreme states/psychosis/madness. His book shows how the psychiatric disease model has failed in its mission to provide an honest theoretical grasp of, or humane response to, the timeless human nature of madness. It also offers a necessary broader vision of madness that embraces the true depth of the mythic and archetypal forces that drive extreme emotional upheavals and potential transformations. His book is encyclopaedic in the best sense of the wordof leaving no stone unturned. It is truly unsurpassed in its bold and comprehensive scholarship.

Dr Michael Cornwall, PhD is editor of the 2 volume Journal of Humanistic Psychology special issue on extreme states, an Esalen Institute conference leader on alternative approaches to psychosis, and has published follow-up research on the Jungian Diabasis House psychosis program

Psychosis, Psychiatry and Psychospiritual Considerations offers a comprehensive examination of the interface between psychotic and spiritual experience and distress. Exploring a neglected area in the psychiatric literature, this important book illuminates the history of the development of psychiatric classification in North America, how the meaning of psychotic experiences has become ignored, and how spiritual understandings in psychiatric practice have been side-lined. It includes a fascinating overview of a wide range of models designed to help mental health professionals assist the people they work with in discerning psychospiritual experiences from psychopathology.

Dr Allister Bush is a Consultant Psychiatrist at Te Whare Marie, Morii Mental Health service, Porirua New Zealand, and co-author of Collaborative and Indigenous Mental Health Therapy: Ttaihono- Stories of Mori Healing and Psychiatry