We went to Brazil not only to see how Spiritism is used in mental health care, but to see why Brazilian culture is much more open to spiritual treatment methods than we are in our culture.
Emma Bragdon who has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has authored several books on spirituality and mental health was our guide. She has been taking groups of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health workers to Brazil for over a decade. On this trip we were accompanied by ten very curious mental health workers from the US, Britain, Canada and Australia—all of them women.
Emma let us know in a very personal way how extremely challenging circumstances in one’s life can both open one up to deeper spiritual realities and culminate in a trip to the hospital with severe mental disturbance. One of her missions is to help a scientifically oriented audience understand what spiritual experiences are and how they can be intimately tied to mental health.
In the next few blogs we will be sharing what we learned from Emma, the mental health workers in her group and, of course, the mental health workers Emma introduced us to in Brazil.
