A year ago I visited a friend in Laventille who related a harrowing scene involving her son-driven crazy by auditory and visual hallucinations. She responded in a way she knew best-visiting a Cocorite seer-gifted in the discernment and removal of malicious spirits-ostensibly the cause of the malady. That was thirty years ago. The young man has since grown up-unscathed, fully functional-husband, father and professional. Our exchange conjured wondrous memories of many a healing I witnessed every Sunday at a Kali temple in Tunapuna. Later, I was privileged to have known Iyalorisha Melvina Rodney-as I immersed in oral traditions and the work of Dr Henry Frances, whose "He had the Power," offered a measured rendition of Orisha and the legendary Pa Neezer.
Back in New York City, known for the most cutting edge procedures in medicine, spiritist healings are taking hold-with success, thanks to a growing Brasilian presence. Practitioners are sometimes called Kardecists, because they follow the "Spiritist" laws codified by the late French physician Alan Kardec. Over the years I have spent ample time with this group-grasping their etiology of mental and emotional disturbances. They hold that existential problems are caused by obsessive spirits-that victims, through their own moral deficiencies become magnets, attracting subtle, and in some cases, overt and pernicious influences of spirits. Alan Kardec once wrote that, "One day obsession is going to be recognised as one of the main causes of mental disorders, as today the action of microscopic living creatures, whose existence no one even suspected."
Indeed, it is a curious philosophy worth investigating. In Brasil there are at least 50 "Spiritist" hospitals where physicians, psychiatrists, nurses, mediums and spirit controllers complement each other. These mediums channel obsessive spirits, who, through forced discourses reveal reasons for perturbing, if not destroying the lives of so many. A host of psycho-emotional problems are laid at the feet of these discarnate souls (spirits). Summarily, these obsessive spirits are counselled until they release victims, bringing peace to both parties. (Of course, it is a far more involved and intricate process.) Emma Bragdon's "Spiritism and Mental Illness: Practices in Spiritist Centers and Spiritist Psychiatric hospitals in Brasil" offers a rare look into this phenomenon. Over the years, this mode of treatment has gained respectability as the Medical Spiritist Association and the Brasilian Association of Spiritist Psychologists bolster the practice through their educational programmes.
Research has also been conducted by The Center for the Study of Religious and Spiritual problems, with clinical trials undertaken by several physicians including Dr Frederico Camelo Leao, who, in 2004 reported that spiritist treatments have proven markedly effective. Recently, The Spiritual Science Research Foundation, founded by Dr Jayant Balaji Athavale, with offices in the US and Australia also prompted many in the mental health field to explore the plausibility of spiritual obsession. SSRF views the spiritual dimension as structured and measurable with the requisite tool of a highly developed perceptive ability. Theirs is an epistemology that bridges psychiatry and Vedic spirituality. Both these approaches have built on the work of Dr Carl Wickland, a relatively obscure psychiatrist, whose book, Thirty Years Among the Dead, published in the 1920s, objectified the spiritual world and mapped its interconnectedness with the mind, body and emotions. He was convinced that all types of dementia, melancholia, kleptomania, dipsomania, and immoralities had their basis in the realm of spirit.
Also notable is the innovation currently taking place in consciousness studies, integrating shamanism with psychoanalysis at California-based institutes. One of is most renowned proponents, Stanislaus Grof, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist and developer of holotropic breath work, quipped that modern medicine would have pathologised the founders of the world's great religions. The diagnosis and therapeutic models of all these approaches vary, but they offer new vistas for understanding the multidimensional layers of the mind where problems are rooted. Grof once stated that "the real problem is different to what you intellectually think it is." I am convinced that these remarkable developments should be keenly followed. This new transcultural paradigm in psychiatry has legitimised shamans, giving credence to the spirit world. It has brought to the fore, the once marginalised role of traditional healers-long labouring in subcultural and shadowy settings, away from the calumny of religious orthodoxy and lay hypocrisy. Today, some governments, as in the case of Bhutan, have embraced these gifted folks as pillars of their nation's health care system.
The insight and abilities of our own seers and healers, also rich in tradition, history, culture, and steeped in spirit, must be respected and preserved. Over the years, their services have been furtively sought by thousands of desperate citizens of every class, race and religious affiliation. With this ongoing shift in psychiatry, the nagging stigma associated with this unique gift to do the incredulous (when all else has failed), may finally be laid to rest. Admittedly, any undertaking to integrate traditional healing with contemporary medicine will require research, standardisation and the establishment of an accrediting body. No doubt, a time-consuming and complex exercise. However, such an initiative is unlikely without nationally acknowledging the true shamans among us. We just cannot proceed without this all important first step.
• Dr Glenville Ashby is correspondent for the Guardian Media group and member of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology