"Head, Heart and Soul: Mental health problem or spiritual crisis?",
Catharine Stott talks to Catherine Lucas, The Spark newspaper, June-Sept 2005, No.41, p30, reproduced with permission

When I lived on booze and drugs, people would yell my name from behind my left ear as I was going to sleep. I wondered if I was going mad. One day, in rehab, another voice told me I’d been given a whole new life. My attitude changed from self-pity to willingness. A psychic said those voices were spirits trying to get my attention. It was good to know they were more than chemically-induced psychosis.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, isn’t traditionally noted for seeing a spiritual side to mental health problems, as Catherine Lucas, one of the organisers of the second annual Revisisoning Mental Health conference at Hawkwood College in Stroud, explains.
“Spiritual experiences, whether through recreational drugs, meditation or a mental health experience, are powerful because they can give meaning to our lives, but practitioners tend to see spiritual experiences as just another symptom,” she says.
Things are changing however. The Royal College of Psychiatrists has about 900 psychiatrists signed up to its recently formed  special interest group on spirituality and mental health. The Mental Health Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health for England are running a three-year project on spirituality and mental health.
Most of us go through a spiritual emergence or awakening at some stage: a gentle shift from material concerns to a desire to help others and be of service. But sometimes this process speeds up and gets out of hand, and the emergence becomes an crisis, or ‘emergency’, a term coined by Stan Grof, a founder of transpersonal pyschology. Symptoms include: difficulty distinguishing the inner visionary world from daily reality; trouble coping with everyday life (because bombarded with inner experiences); intense emotions, visions and other sensory changes, and unusual thoughts.
Adds Catherine , “Grof says that aspects of a spiritual emergency look like psychosis, and because the two may go hand in hand, the diagnosis can be tricky.”
Twenty years ago, Catherine, a former lecturer in European Studies, ended up in a psychiatric ward diagnosed with a psychotic breakdown. She later worked as a patient’s advocate and trained in Buddhism-based psychotherapy. It was only five years ago, when reading Grof that she understood what had really been happening to her. “I had another major crisis two years ago. My mind was desparately trying to create meaning about what I was experiencing. This, coupled with the terror I was feeling, resulted in the mind creating paranoid thoughts. The psychiatrist was keen to prescribe pretty heavy-duty anti-psychotic drugs. But I preferred to use mild tranquilisers and mindfulness to manage the fear and so dissipate the paranoid thoughts. I watched my thoughts, saying ‘I am experiencing fear but I am not my fear.”
Mindfulness is a method of observing one’s thoughts and feelings as they arise without judgement. “People tend to come out of spiritual crises with a greatly enhanced quality of life because their values have changed and their role in society can be very positive,” says Catherine. As a direct result of her experience, she and friend John Fotheringhame put on a conference at Hawkwood College on A Mindfulness-Based Approach to Spiritual Emergency.
She says: “This year’s conference, Working With Spiritual Crisis, is an opportunity to explore their own or their clients’ issues around their issues of spiritual emergence(y) in a workshop setting.” The speakers are: David Lukoff, an American psychologist who got a new diagnosis of ‘religious or spiritual problem’ into the psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual DSM IV; Barbara Stones, who uses Family Systems Constellation Work for issues such as psychosis and trauma; and Rosamund Oliver, a spiritual care educator, working with loss, death and illness.
Riding out spiritual emergencies requires self-awareness and support from the right people, and to this end Catherine is involved in setting up a national Spiritual Crisis Network. Catherine says, “We’re connecting with people from all over the country, so if someone calls they can be in touch with sympathetic people in their area, including someone with personal experience, and a mental health professional. In the meantime we’re building a website (not ready as Spark went to press) to put information on: about books, articles, local networks and videos.”