Week 10 - Shannon Trinh

Integrating the spirit realm into psychology would open more perspective and suggestions to alternative solutions to the term “mental health” and healing overall.  Spirit realms can give other explanations to the specific sensations that we experience in every day life – it would in addition give diagnoses more of a holistic view. For example, like in the reading “What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital” mental “disorders” are caused by imbalance of energies. With this kind of worldview on mental illnesses, psychologists and psychiatrists can broaden their options when it comes to treatment. It would be able to promote conversation about the effectiveness of Western medicine and the investigation of unconventional practices such as meditation, acupuncture, and energy crystals.

A major challenge of this transition of thinking would be the hesitation about “seeing is believing.” Usually when diagnosing and individual for mental health illnesses, their disorders are translated through wiring of the brain, neurotransmitter activity, memory/cognitive tasks, etc. There is always some tangible science behind these justifications of diagnoses. Bringing in the spirit realm would ultimately be seen as a threat to these truths that have been built by the Western world over time.  

I believe one of the best strategies to achieve inclusivity of the spirit realm is integrating spiritual measures into psychology research. For example, testing whether or not people have improved moods after medication or therapy vs. spiritual healing. Really investigating to find correlations between numerous variables that are used in the spirit realm and mental health/holistic health will give more tangible evidence on whether or not these alternative methods of healing work. Just because we cannot physically see or touch spirits, doesn’t mean we cannot use methodologies to find the answers we crave for.

Question: What if those who believed that schizophrenia caused by bad spirits and energies were actually credible? Is it possible for academia to revisit history and re-test /challenge these ideas?