Sacred

While a great deal of the excitement about advances in psychological treatments comes from the potential for research in neuroscience to unlock the secrets of the brain, many mental health experts would like to temper this enthusiasm. A special issue of the Behavior Therapist released this month calls into question the predominant conception of mental illnesses as brain disorders.

In this piece for The Cut, Amy Larocca investigates various aspects of the wellness industry, including homeopathy, natural medicine, spiritual exercise classes, and meditation, exploring...

From Rolling Stone Magazine: Both the underground practice of and aboveground research on the use of psychedelic drugs to heal PTSD, as well as depression, anxiety,...

In recent years, American scholars and thinkers have increasingly argued for the secularization and modernization of Buddhism, proposing meditation as a fully secular form...

In this piece for Nautilus, Veronique Greenwood discusses the legacy of Julian Jaynes, a psychologist best known for theorizing that consciousness was a cultural development resulting...

A free recording of last week's webinar anchored to Phil Borges' Crazywise, a documentary exploring alternative approaches to mental health, is now available. Over 4,000 people...

From Healio: Preliminary research results presented at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting in San Diego, California suggested that integrating spirituality into mental heath services...

The world calls what was "wrong" with me "bipolar." I prefer the notion that I went through a birth process to become the healer that I am today. I can't be silent because I know there are people like I was who are trapped and may not realize it yet. When they begin to see the prison bars that surround them, I want to be there for them as others were for me.

From Psychiatric Times: A recent study suggests that Kundalini yoga may be at least as effective as memory training in improving cognitive resilience in older adults with...

From Science of Us: Researchers have found that awe and other Self-Transcendent Experiences have positive consequences for people's mental and emotional health, including enhanced interconnectedness and...

What are we doing to our people? What life have we created for our youth? I want to believe that those struggling individuals for whom life became unbearable under the influence of medication cocktails have not died in vain. I have chosen to see their action as both a sacrifice and statement to all of us.

In this video for Aeon, clinical psychologist Daniel Brown discusses the ways that the construction of a fixed selfhood can limit the possibilities of our...

In this piece for The New York Times, John Williams praises the work of philosopher William James, who played an important role in studying and...

Mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, according to Malidoma Patrice Somé in “What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital” published in Earth. We are...

This week we e-release a new free booklet, Pathways to Enhance Well-Being. Its creation began with my colleague Linda Lentini sharing with me some of the barriers she experienced as she moved towards bringing alternative approaches such as meditation and breath practices into state psychiatric institutions.

From The New York Times: In his new book The Mind of God, neurologist Jay Lombard uses his experience studying neuroscience to discuss philosophical and spiritual...

From The Conversation: Removed from their ethical and contextual roots, mindfulness-based practices are increasingly being used to reinforce the individualist ideals of capitalist societies. "Indeed mindfulness-based practices...

What are some tactics used by voices, and what can you do about it? I hope the suggestions in this piece can help desperate voice-hearers become more understanding of the forces behind their agony, and perhaps bring a more enlightened perspective to the chemically-lobotomizing tendencies of their psychiatrists who treat voices with more medication.

The International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry had the clout to draw a stellar line-up of presenters to its recent conference, including internationally prominent critics like David Healy, Peter Gøtzsche, Robert Whitaker and Allen Frances. There were lots of learnings and even some tense discussions, but one of the most intriguing aspects of the entire conference was the way in which scientific and social issues became deeply intertwined, especially when presenters reached for better pathways forward.

I am a psychiatric survivor of over thirty-six years. Since my nervous breakdown in 1978, I have undergone multitudinous experiences ranging from the subtly humiliating to the horrifically debilitating at the hands of incompetent psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists who, in the name of medicine, did more harm than good.

We need to burn through some darkness before we collectively see the light. The light is a palpable shift toward reaching for human connection; toward opening our hearts and our minds and intentionally focusing on the positive future that wants to emerge.

From TIME: A new scientific review suggests that yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness activities can reverse stress-related changes in genes linked to health problems and...

From VolteFace Magazine: MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can play a major role in helping people heal from the effects of trauma. "The results really are incredible and I’ve had...

A spiritual emergency is a crisis during which experiences are so intense that they temporarily disrupt the sense of self. Mislabeling them as pathological symptoms may be damaging to further spiritual development as well as to the individual's psychological and physiological well-being.

US News interviews people who've been touched by tragedies, and then found ways to "embrace pain" and experience revelations about their lives followed...