Mental Health, Religion & Culture
September 21, 2026
Arif Ali, Niharika Malhotra, Spalzes Angmo
Understanding cultural and religious beliefs related to mental illness is essential for the effective delivery of psychiatric care in a culturally diverse and spiritually embedded country such as India. This single-case study examines a young adult male with paranoid schizophrenia whose delusions incorporated spiritual and cultural narratives, including ancestral curses, divine powers, and...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
September 9, 2026
Mia J. Wild, Oleg N. Medvedev
In daily life, resilience helps us bounce back from challenges, staying strong in both mind and body. Yet, many attempts to strengthen resilience have had limited success. We explored whether practicing meditation for over a year might lead to higher resilience by comparing 94 long-term meditators with an equal number of non-meditators, matched by age and sex. We found that the meditators...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
September 13, 2024
Simon Dein
4 citations
This review paper focuses upon bereavement related perceptions (also called bereavement hallucinations). It begins with a discussion of the literature on the epidemiology, phenomenology, cultural variation and the transformative nature of such perceptions. There follows a critical discussion of the role of bereavement hallucinations in the origins of early Christianity and more specifically...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
August 9, 2023
Saadia Dildar, Asiya Khalid, Ansa Naveed et al.
3 citations
The aim of the current study was to explore mindfulness and mystical experiences in Sufis and non-Sufis. Purposive sampling was used to collect the sample of 30 Sufis and 30 non-Sufis from members of Muslim Institute Lahore and two government universities of Lahore, respectively. The instruments used were a mystical orientation scale and a Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. The results...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
October 20, 2020
Joshua J. Knabb, R. Pate, Sean Sullivan et al.
ABSTRACT In the current study, the authors developed and pilot tested a manualized four-week program for Christian adults with daily stress, combining Christian meditation with light-to-moderate physical activity among a community sample of churchgoers (N = 8). Although Eastern-influenced mindful walking and yoga practices are quite popular in the contemporary psychology literature as...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
September 13, 2020
T. Dallas, Noelle Marina Baroutsa, S. Dein
10 citations
ABSTRACT The present critical review examines the role of religious healing in mental health in Greece. After describing the history of psychiatry in Greece, and the close links between medicine and religion, we discuss the role of various ritual contexts in healing mental distress. Findings suggest that supernatural explanatory models of mental illness, such as the evil eye and spirit...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
August 9, 2019
A. Ang, C. Montiel
6 citations
ABSTRACT Where there are diverse professionals and curers dealing with possession, differences in representations exist. This study uses social representations theory as a frame to examine both the representational overlaps and differences in possession among various Filipino health professionals and the lay distinctly socialised in Western biomedical and psychological lenses and in local...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
September 14, 2018
Pierre Didier Nyongo Ndoua, Kaveh Vaghar
ABSTRACT The Bwiti is one out of several religions in Africa and through it, it is believed, that the members can be connected to the world of the ancestors. There is also the ritual of healing in Bwiti. In this ritual, participants are invited to take iboga. They fall into a trance and after this phase, which in principle lasts three days; those who were sick recover the health in many cases....
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
August 9, 2018
Shane Alan Martin
2 citations
With increasing participation in Eastern contemplative activities by Western-born practitioners, psychological research is needed on how meditation influences conceptualizations of the self. Descriptive thematic analyses of one-on-one interviews with seven women and men residing in USA focused on how their perceptions of the self were affected by dedication to practicing meditation (from...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
November 26, 2017
Justina Kaselionyte, Andrew Gumley
7 citations
ABSTRACT Meditation, an ancient Eastern spiritual practice, is increasingly being practised in the West where its benefits for mental and physical health have been established. Extreme mental states that can be encountered in the context of meditation have also been reported and often have been labelled as psychosis or spiritual emergency. This study aimed for more nuanced understanding of the...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
August 8, 2016
This research aims to examine how traditional insight meditation in Thailand is trained and to investigate the impact of this practice on happiness and perceived stress. The fuller meaning of mindfulness and how to interweave mindfulness in daily practice is discussed. The intervention was a seven-day traditional insight meditation retreat in Thailand. The final sample included 656...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
February 27, 2015
Simon Dein, Christopher C. H. Cook
The agentive aspects of communicative religious experiences remain somewhat neglected in the social sciences literature. There is a need for phenomenological descriptions of these experiences and the ways in which they differ from culturally defined psychopathological states. In this semi-structured interview study, eight congregants attending an evangelical church in London were asked to...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
February 1, 2014
Current research on mystical experience is offering community mental health professionals the opportunity to re-consider the role of love within clinical care. In psychological literature the historical conflation of love and sexuality is fraught with ethical concerns about professional impropriety, and the abuse of power. But the intimacy, intensity and beauty to be found within the...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
June 27, 2011
Heather A. Mastrianno
3 citations
The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Zen meditation on security and satisfaction in monogamous relationships. Levels of security and satisfaction as described by interpersonal theorist Harry Stack Sullivan, as well as meditation experience, were analysed via survey data. Data were collected via the Internet from 405 men and women who were 18 years of age or older and had...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
February 16, 2010
Simon R. Jones
11 citations
The paradigm within which hallucinations are studied, and the explanatory frameworks employed, may bias the phenomenological analysis of these experiences. After introducing the new term, hallucination, this paper undertook an inter-disciplinary study of the phenomenology of hallucinations identified by the sixteenth-century theologians, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila. It was...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
December 8, 2008
David J. Wilde, Craig D. Murray
38 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have become a topic of increasing interest to medical and psychological researchers over the last 35 years. During the course of this research agenda, several studies have focused on the phenomenology of the experience and its after-effects, mostly from a nomothetic stance. The aim of this study was to investigate the experience of having an NDE and what meaning...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
May 1, 1999
Elizabeth R. Valentine, Philip L. G. Sweet
408 citations
Abstract The performance of concentrative and mindfulness meditators on a test of sustained attention (Wilkins' counting test) was compared with controls. Both groups of meditators demonstrated superior performance on the test of sustained attention in comparison with controls, and long-term meditators were superior to short-term meditators. Mindfulness meditators showed superior performance in...