Why Does Psychiatry Continue to Neglect the Spiritual?

Modern psychiatry was largely written by the uninitiated.

One need look no further than the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, to understand what a drought of spiritual thought has haunted the halls of academia for over a hundred years. He famously dismissed all spiritual experience as pathology, railing against religion as a “delusional remolding of reality.”

His successors have mostly followed suit, save for Carl Jung, who I consider a modern shaman, a successful sacredphrenic, and have written about separately. Secularism remains the prevailing ethos of our “mind doctors,” even though 90 percent of Americans believe in God and roughly half of all Americans claim to have had some sort of spiritual experience.

So, why does psychiatry continue to neglect the spiritual? According to UNM psychology professor William Miller, it’s because it’s still going through a stage of adolescence. “Because psychology came from religion and philosophy, we had to say, ‘I am not religion, I am not religion, I am not religion.’ And then as you grow up, you kind of find your way back to your roots. And I think psychology is [starting to do] that: we’re reconnecting with William James and the philosophic and theological roots that were there when psychology began.”

William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience, considered the classic attempt to make sense of spiritual experience from a scientific perspective. James, a Harvard professor at the turn of the 20th century, did what so many of his intellectual peers failed to do: admit his ignorance in the face of the numinous. Even though he himself never had a spiritual experience, he could not ignore the life-transforming power of such experiences among those who are wired for the spiritual, genetically or otherwise.

In 1901, James took the academic world by storm by vouching for the mental health of mystically-inclined people, asking why his fellow scientists could not envision the world as consisting of “many interpenetrating spheres of reality.”

He famously wrote, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

What James did for mystics, it’s time for us to do for “schizophrenics.”

It’s time we honor not only the “mystically coherent,” those who come back from their journeys in one piece, but also the mystically incoherent, those whose souls have been scrambled by their journeys and who require deep nutritional intervention, chemical detoxification, and shamanic surgery, among other methods, but are instead impelled down the conventional psychopharmacological route because that’s the only culturally sanctioned route available to them.

When we pathologize their voice-hearing and other extrasensory perception, we are in effect “barring out phenomena from our notice.” We’re demanding that their treatment fit our narrow, preconceived definition of reality, and in the process we’re doing a great disservice to them, but also to ourselves.

Psychiatrists will never comprehend their subject until they come to terms with the adolescence of their field. If they only knew what universes exist inside their “schizophrenic” patients, if they only accepted their experiences as real, as ontologically valid, they would take a considerable step toward discovering truly effective treatment, as opposed to symptom suppression, which we do so well in the West.

Until psychiatry admits that religion, and therefore spirituality, is its mother, I’m afraid its so-called “scholars” will continue fishing while sitting on a whale.