Beyond Pathology: Meaning, Spirituality, Culture, and Connection (In-Person Only)
- 3-3:30pm God, Psychosis, and Blackness: Methodological Reflections from a Grounded Theory Study - Candice NunnTelfort, PhD
- 3:30-4pm Becoming Creative Architects of the Stories of Our Lives: Making Meaning Through the Symbols in Psychosis Through Honoring the Content of Our Madness - Jennifer Gaita Siciliano, MST
- 4-4:30pm Psychosis, Relationality, and Reconnection in a Time of Poly-crisis - Michelle Boyle MA, PhDc, Katie Mottram, MSc
God, Psychosis, and Blackness: Methodological Reflections from a Grounded Theory Study - Candice NunnTelfort, PhD
There has long been an enduring relationship between God and psychosis, from the seminal case of Daniel Paul Schreber to contemporary discussions of religious visions, voices, and spiritual experiences within psychiatric discourse. For the Black participants in my grounded theory study on Blackness and psychosis, this relationship emerged in distinctive ways, as Blackness mediated both their experiences of God and their experiences of psychosis. Participants described divine encounters, spiritual suffering, and theological meaning-making that challenged conventional distinctions between religious experience and psychopathology. This presentation explores the grounded theory methodology used to analyze these narratives and demonstrates how qualitative research can illuminate the intersections of Blackness, psychosis, and religious experience.
Becoming Creative Architects of the Stories of Our Lives: Making Meaning Through the Symbols in Psychosis Through Honoring the Content of Our Madness - Jennifer Gaita Siciliano, MST
Storytelling is what builds worlds in our minds, so becoming one's own architect in the story of one's own life is essential in making meaning of our psychosis. Treating psychotic experiences as meaningful is threatening to the biomedical model of madness, as the patient never knows what is real. To show the richness of this error in assumed hierarchy, I will share my personal story of my Near-Death-Experience on a flight home from India in 1994, which led to my bipolar sentence of forced drugging and involuntary hospitalizations for the next three decades. Ultimately, the only way to find my way back home to my sanity was through learning to interpret and trust the voices of my guides—a Star-Trekkian angel squad in an alternate universe that got me safely home from India. Today's psychiatric medicine is not in the practice of guiding the spiritual initiate home to healing after shamanic dismemberment, and instead, pathologizes the state of distress while ignoring the content in a wakeful dream state. Oftentimes, a fear of the mad--or psychophobia--prevents deep explorative work in areas of symbolic interpretation. For creatives, this dreamy state is where inspiration sits, and many of us who unexpectedly find ourselves in that ethereal zone collecting our bits and pieces of symbolism in order to tell our stories, get lost along the way. When I entered these states, the symbolic messages were highly personal, and always meaningful, as they contained premonitions of psychic memories of the people of yesterday who walked the same path.Fear on the part of the mental health professional also strongly dictates the course of treatment, often crushing an artist's ability to feel deeply or create because of overmedicalization. In this talk, I aim to share the needs for better social treatments beyond drugs and provide evidence of cultural engagement programs that have shown success in positive outcomes in helping people share their stories through art, theater, and community connection. For me, launching my Not As Crazy As You Think Podcast was instrumental in my final recovery stage, as the podcast shares the message that states of mental distress are not the result of individual pathology but manifest as a sign of guidance to redirect our lives.
Psychosis, Relationality, and Reconnection in a Time of Poly-crisis - Michelle Boyle MA, PhDc, Katie Mottram, MSc
Dominant mental health frameworks continue to locate experiences labelled as psychosis within the individual, obscuring the relational and social contexts from which they emerge. Building on ISPS traditions that understand psychosis as a response to social alienation, this presentation extends the concept of relationality beyond the human domain to include ecological and more-than-human worlds.In a dialogical format, Michelle Boyle and Katie Mottram weave lived experience voices, real-life scenarios, and interdisciplinary theory to explore how experiences commonly pathologised as psychosis may also be understood as gestures toward re-connection - at the intra, inter and trans-personal level. Many such experiences point not only to disrupted interpersonal bonds, but to altered or intensified forms of relationship with the land, the environment, and the more-than-human world.We place these contemporary experiences alongside broader socio-historical processes, not simply as withdrawal from the self and the social, but as attempts to reconstitute forms of coherence in the wake of our current poly-crises. At the same time, we consider the role of trauma in spiritual emergence and extreme states, asking how deep wounding may become intertwined with experiences of meaning, identity, belonging and vocation. Rather than reducing such experiences to pathology, we explore how they may contain initiations of unrealised capacities and ways of relating that seek healing expression, raising important questions about how individuals and communities might support processes of emergence in ways that foster healing - both for the individual and the collective. Giving consideration to Indigenous and other relational cosmologies, we ask: what might it mean to understand psychosis not only as a response to social disconnection among humans, but as an expression of a deeper rupture in the web of relations? And how might therapeutic, communal, and cultural practices shift if the restoration of connection extended beyond the interpersonal to include the more-than-human world?Attending to these questions may also open toward emerging forms of collective understanding and care in a time of deepening social and ecological strain, where experiences at the margins can illuminate both present fractures and possibilities for renewed relational life.
