Emma Bragdon – Founder And Chair Of IMHU.org

 

The revolution in mental healthcare begins by recognizing the profound potential of spiritual emergence as the next step towards human flourishing. Join the conversation with Emma Bragdon, Founder and Chair of Integrative Mental Health University (IMHU.org), as she details her journey, inspired by the holistic paradigm of care she observed in Brazilian spiritist psychiatric hospitals that attend to biological, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of health. Dr. Bragdon discusses how spiritual experiences are often misdiagnosed as psychosis—a “spiritual emergency”—and how IMHU is dedicated to filling the educational gaps for professionals so they can better support individuals’ spiritual evolution and help them flourish.

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Emma Bragdon – Founder And Chair Of IMHU.org

Emma Bragdon is the founder and executive director of Integrative Mental Health University, to be found at IMHU.org. She earned her PhD in Transpersonal Psychology in 1987 and was licensed in California as a marriage, family, and child therapist in 1988. As a pioneer who has helped define the field of spiritual emergency, Emma has published seven books and co-produced two documentary films.

Within IMHU, Emma has trained over 130 spiritual emergence coaches who are available to support individuals disoriented or in distress as they open to their spirituality. She also leads a small group of healthcare providers to Brazil once a year to learn about the spiritist paradigm of mental healthcare from spiritist practitioners. Emma maintains a private practice consulting internationally via Zoom. See EmmaBragdon.com for personal consultations or IMHU.org for courses.

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Dr. Bragdon, thank you so much for joining us. It’s a delight to see you.

Thank you for inviting me. I’m honored to be your guest, Tim.

How Brazilian Spiritism Inspired A New Paradigm Of Mental Healthcare

I’m hoping you could start us off by letting us know a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.

The work I’m doing is being the executive director of an online university called Integrative Mental Health University. I previously started a foundation called the Foundation for Energy Therapies, Inc. It is dedicated to education as well as research. I was especially inspired by traveling in Brazil. I was able to visit community centers and some psychiatric hospitals that are run by spiritists. I’ll explain if your audience would like to know what that means in a minute. The spiritists have been cultivating a way of working with people that not only attends to the biological, the psychological, and the community or social aspect of what might be bothering a person, but also the spiritual aspect, all four.

 

I found, as I researched further, that I felt like they had a paradigm of care that was more advanced than ours. They’ve been cultivating it since the late 19th century, which means that they’ve been through a lot of phases of development, and they’ve kept what works. I wanted to expose this to the rest of the world outside of Brazil and give people the opportunity to visit and see with their own eyes and experience what I had experienced. I also wanted to bring that paradigm to the United States, not necessarily under the name of spiritism. I’m not looking for followers. I’m not looking to create a new religion at all, a cult, or anything like that.

The paradigm of bringing spirituality into mental healthcare seems extremely important to me after what I’ve seen. Thankfully, there’s a lot of research going on now that will tell us that, for instance, meditators who practice meditation quite devotedly, meaning every day, are in better health. Their brains actually take a different shape. They’re much less prone to depression. We are moving into an area where it’s quite well known that spiritual practices can enhance mental health, if done in the appropriate way with some guidance.

Spiritual practices can enhance mental health, if done in the appropriate way with some guidance. Share on X

What I’m bringing to this is timely. It’s another voice coming from a somewhat different angle, but also working with the people, the scientists, and the researchers who are doing such wonderful work these days around what the components of human flourishing are. IMHU, our university, is right in line with that new research and wants to bring more of it to the international public. We have 46 courses. There’s a lot that we’re doing, both for people who are experiencing difficulties in their mental health and some distress.

More and more so, we want to help the healthcare providers, like the psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and coaches, to fill in the gaps of their own education, because it is quite recent that we’ve made this turn to decide that spirituality can be an important component of mental healthcare. Those people who were educated prior to the last five years, let’s say, didn’t learn much about this in their graduate school training or in their postgraduate school training. We hope to fill in some of the gaps in that. I guess I’m answering more than your initial question. What brought me to this was getting inspired in Brazil by what I saw, but also, I have a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology, which also dovetails spirituality to some extent into mental healthcare.

Is Consciousness More Than A Byproduct Of Neural Firings? Near-Death Experiences As Evidence

As I’m reading through the book Spiritism and Mental Health, one of the things that you talk about so clearly is some of the evidence for our consciousness or our awareness, that being other than just the byproduct of random neural firings, as Eben Alexander used to believe. You are reading and citing research. The Spiritist Movement does research around how people are aware of things that they wouldn’t be able to be aware of if their consciousness were simply tied to brain functioning, which we can track. We have people who have had near-death experiences or death experiences and come back from them.

During a period of time where we’re monitoring their brain functioning and finding nothing that could support any evidence of consciousness or life, people come back from that and have a memory of what happened while they were ‘gone.’ If there is something there that’s more than just the physical body, and all we’re treating with our mental health work is the physical body or the logical part of it, we’re missing vast expanses of who we are as people and what might be contributing to what we say are our problems.

We’re on the same page. Given what we’re finding through, for instance, research around human flourishing, it’s very clear that there is this wide expanse of more human potential. We’re able to put names to it now, not just say, “We’re only using 10% of our brain function. We’re able to say, “There are other senses. Maybe we’ve gathered them all under that name of intuition before, but even intuition has had a bad name. Because it’s becoming a bit more acceptable, we can talk about experiences, not only general people, but neuroscientists and neurosurgeons, like Eben Alexander, whom you quote.

 

They are having experiences. It’s leading them to question what we’ve thought before and expand their whole notion of what’s possible. Dr. Eben Alexander shifted his life so that he’s teaching people how to move into these expanded states without having to die clinically. I have to laugh, but it’s a wonderful piece of work to assist people in moving into these other states of consciousness to expand their potential.

Beyond Symptom Suppression: Why We Need To Focus On “Human Flourishing”

Help me remember the word you used for our mental state. Did you say flourishing?

Flourishing, correct.

I love that. As I was driving to work, on the radio before it could kick over to the book on tape I was listening to, I heard an advertisement for a medication. I wouldn’t go deep into the insanity of it, but I want to key into one thing. It is an advertisement on the radio for a medication to help suppress my symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, in other words, uncontrolled shaking movements, etc. The woman says, “I’m so glad I found this medication.”

They say, with all these other side effects or other main effects that are ugly, which you don’t want, “Here’s the good news. You can still take this while you’re taking your other mental health medicines.” That phrase struck me. This is not about mental health. Instead of talking about suppressing symptoms, you’re talking about helping people move into a state of flourishing. I don’t want to be on the sidelines cheering you on. I want to be out there in the field with you promoting that. That’s a marvelous thing.

I’m happy to have you be a partner in that. That’s great. It’s going to take a big team.

I love the word. Instead of saying, “It’s mental health,” it’s been co-opted in so many different ways. This is about flourishing as a person. This is the whole picture of you as a person. You labeled four different areas. You can cut it up into twelve or fifteen, but it’s not just, “I got enough food. I got enough sleep. I got enough water. I got enough air to breathe.” It’s a lot more than having a life that is flourishing.

Flourishing implies that someone is happy. They feel satisfied. They have a sense of purpose in their life and their work. Their life is aligned with their sense of purpose. It gives them meaning. It’s not just about the very important material things you talked about, like enough food on the table and maybe physical health and a dry and warm house in the wintertime, or a dry and not so warm house in the summertime. It’s not so much about that as it is about meaning, purpose, and community.

What’s being added to this is also the importance of the environment. That doesn’t mean that one has to live in the forest or near a lake because it’s beautiful, and if you don’t live near a lake, then you’re in bad luck. It means an environment that’s safe and perhaps uplifting in some way. For some people, that will be a city. For others like me, it’ll be closer to nature. The environment can also be important. The whole concept of human flourishing is actually a very well-explored program for Human Flourishing at Harvard University.

To my delight, I found out that they’re doing collaborative work with some of my colleagues in Brazil. Alexander Moreira-Almeida is one of the most well-known researchers who happens to be a spiritist. He happens to be Brazilian, living in Brazil, and teaching there as a psychiatrist. He has made good connections with the people at Human Flourishing, the program at Harvard. There will be a global conference in May. I think it’s May 14th and 15th in the Boston area. In March, McLean Hospital, with another organization, is also sponsoring a similar kind of conversation, looking at spirituality and religion as an important component of mental healthcare.

There are two opportunities for people like you and me, and maybe some of your audience, to look deeply into this focus on spirituality, religion, and mental healthcare towards human flourishing. It’s very much part of fabulous research right now, as well as an international conversation. I’m thrilled because IMHU fits right in here. We hope to also be part of the conference and offer a program. We’ll see if that works. Nonetheless, there are going to be some wonderful people attending and offering as part of the program.

Spiritual Vs. Spiritist: Defining The Movement That Is Transforming Mental Health

I know that we’ve got at least two or three things to come back to. One, before I forget, you had mentioned the idea of other ways to perceive, other than the five very solid, gross, you might say, senses. David E. Martin wrote the book, Lizards Eat Butterflies. In it, he explores the idea that if we have twelve cranial nerves, and we’ve got five of them that go directly to our five senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, etc., what are the other seven for? What if we’ve missed the boat?

What if each of the other seven cranial nerves provides us ways to experience life or take in information, and we’re not trained into the sensitivity to them, or we’ve been conditioned away from the sensitivity to them? That was a point that I wanted to put out here. If you don’t know about his book or his efforts to explore the other seven cranial nerves and ways to interact with the world, that might be of interest to you. The other thing was, can you give us a simple definition for the difference between spiritual and spiritist?

I’d like to start there.

Please do.

I mentioned that I became very interested in spiritism. That was in 2001. As a person with a doctorate in Transpersonal Psychology, when I ran into it, and I recognized that about 1/5 of the population of Brazil attends spiritist centers, I thought, “Why haven’t I heard about this? Was I asleep?” When I came back to this country, the United States, I realized most people know nothing about it. Here we go. Back in the 1850s and ‘60s, an educator who used the pen name Allan Kardec thought he’d take a look at what was popular in Paris at the time. He was a Frenchman.

What was popular was seances, people getting together and seeing if they could contact the spirits in some way to help them along in their life, or to gain more perspective about what’s going on on planet Earth. At first, he thought, “This isn’t going to lead to anything.” He started realizing, “Wait a minute. It is leading to something.” Like a very well-disciplined educator, he set up a whole body of questions and then would ask a lot of different mediums who were well-respected in their day to answer questions.

For instance, what’s the meaning of life? Why are we here? How do we make life a very satisfying and fulfilling experience for us? What is the interaction that spirits have with human beings? What happens to us after we die? He collated the answers that he got that were similar from different mediums who didn’t know each other. Out of that, to make a long story short, came five books. This was Paris in the middle of the 19th century. There were Brazilian students who came from wealthy families who were getting educated at universities in Paris.

They brought the books back to Brazil. It seemed to be very fertile ground because spiritism wants to facilitate spiritual evolution. Spirituality in itself, or spiritualism, oftentimes looks at the phenomena as in, “Look at that, tipping tables. Look at that. Someone seemed to be playing a guitar, even though the guitar was on the other side of the room, and they had no physical touch with it.” There are all kinds of manifestations that people can become fascinated with around spiritualism.

Spiritism itself was oriented towards spiritual evolution. Towards that end, they also developed ways to assist people in becoming more physically healthy through attending to the subtle levels of their body structure. For instance, through our study of Eastern philosophy, most of us recognize now that there are meridians of the body that acupuncturists attend to. We recognize there are chakras, which are energy centers of the body that are connected to certain organs of the body, usually thought of as being connected to certain organs. There’s also the aura that can become congested, even though it is a subtle aspect of the body that we don’t physically see and can’t be physically measured in a scientific way.

 

The spiritists will attend to that level, the more subtle level of being a human being. Where there is, as an example, congestion in the auric field of a person, or congestion in the chakras or the energy centers of the body, some of the techniques that have evolved in spiritism can clear that congestion. That has a very important impact on improving physical and mental health. I named one particular technique that’s used, but that technique is used in all spiritist centers. It’s a form of energy medicine or energy work, some people call it. Some people think of it as being similar to Reiki, which has become quite popular in the United States. The spiritists use it frequently and for free, offering it.

It’s one of the most popular things that is offered to the spiritist centers because most of our doctors, nurses, and all who are trained in a biomedical system can attend to allopathic care, but they won’t attend to the subtle body or the spiritual aspect of a person. That’s where spiritism comes in to help. It is not a replacement for allopathic care. It is more of an adjunct or something that complements allopathic care. There’s no conflict at all. It’s only offering more of the subtle and spiritual aspect of health and healing to people for free through spiritist centers and spiritist psychiatric hospitals.

The Spiritist Approach: Systemic Healing Of The Whole Person

As I understand it, the fundamental approach of spiritism is to look systemically at the whole person at physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels for realignment or establishing a flow, or to help the system heal itself, rather than simply in the medical model we have here in the US. We’re into symptom suppression. I remember a number of years ago listening to an interview with Dr. Mark Hyman. He said, “It isn’t rocket science to figure out what it takes to live a healthy, loving human life.”

We would list the same things we just listed. People have known for a long time, if they’ve slowed down and thought about it, while it helps some scientists think about the body in terms of it’s a machine, and we can take out somebody’s kidney and put it in somebody else, etc., that analogy only goes so far. There’s a lot more going on here than just the physical. If you can have a system like spiritism that acknowledges that and starts working with these other aspects in conjunction with the physical and the mental, the emotional, the social, and the relationship work, those of us who’ve worked in this field understand how much more effective that can be.

Thank you. Again, we’re on the same page.

It happens without all the negative effects that come from just suppressing symptoms.

The Dangerous Diabetes Analogy: When Patients Are Misled About Psychiatric Medication

Most of the spiritists don’t have an attitude against psychiatric medication, but the spiritist hospitals that I have visited, and there have been several of them, take a more moderate approach. I was in Brazil in November 2025. One of the psychiatrists who was in the position of teaching us said, “What we try to do if we’re using psychiatric medication is use it only up to a certain point where someone can still feel their connection to God.” I’ve never heard that from anyone.

 

In one of my sessions, a patient reported to me that the psychiatrist said to them, “You are going to need to take this medication for depression, just like somebody who needs insulin for diabetes.” There’s no scientific basis for that that I’ve ever been aware of from studies. It’s been disproven many times, yet it’s still being given as verbiage to patients as though this is the truth.

I’ve felt upset about that. Maybe you have, too, Tim. I look back at my graduate school education, which happened in the 1980s. Some of the doctors who are now in a position to offer advice to people also had education back in the ‘80s or ‘90s, when they were taught that psychiatric medication is the thing we are looking for.

It’s here. It’s answered our prayers. We’re all set.

It’s it. They aren’t so apt to look at some of the research that’s saying, “No, we’ve got to look elsewhere.” That’s not happening. We don’t have faith in it being a chemical that we need to look for. There’s something else.

There are a lot of something elses. A lot is going on for an individual.

Unfortunately, I have not read the book that you told me about. I love the title of it, but I’m so immersed in some of the other things I’m doing. I haven’t been reading as much, but I can attend to the question you asked.

It isn’t necessary that you read the book. It’s just an affirmation that there are a lot of good minds, and maybe not the majority of them, out there saying, “There’s a lot more going on here than the physical.” One of those people is David E. Martin. The book was Lizards Eat Butterflies. If I understand correctly, he’s still moving on, having gatherings with people and trying to do experiential exercises to expand their awareness and perhaps gain greater facility with, or experience conscious awareness of. What are the other senses that might be tied to these seven cranial nerves that exist in us, just like the five cranial nerves that feed the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, etc.?

Training Mediums: Pineal Gland Research And The Scientific Study Of Intuition

I’ve written down to read that particular book, but I will say that’s part of what has me fascinated about the spiritists. They do have a number of people who were doing research. One person comes to mind who did write a chapter in the book Spiritism and Mental Health. He was doing research, and probably still is, on the pineal gland. The pineal gland is very active in those people who are especially sensitive in being able to contact the intuition.

We can call them mediums. That’s what they’re called in Brazil. I’m not here to say that everyone who calls himself a medium is 100% accurate. There are a lot of people who have possibly very strong intuition who aren’t necessarily accurate all the time. It is extremely difficult, if you have the gift of intuition, to be accurate all the time. Within spiritism, they train mediums, in other words, people who have a strong intuition. They train them so that they can have the most accuracy possible. They only work in teams, so there’s always a supervisor there who will be helpful for someone if they start moving in the direction of not being accurate and needing some time out.

If we take the notion that it is possible to get information about another person without ever meeting them and only hearing possibly their name and possibly knowing that they live 3,000 miles away, a medium who is well-trained and profoundly gifted can come up with a lot of accurate information about where that person lives, what some of their problems might be on a physical level, what some of their emotional issues might be, and what they might need to do to reclaim a higher ability to manifest health.

That kind of work is quite extraordinary. I don’t expect everyone to manifest that in life, but the very fact that some people are highly trained and highly gifted mediums can help us to see that there is something within us as human beings that we call intuition that can give us information outside of our physical knowing. In other words, we don’t need to use our five senses to validate that it’s true.

Some people are highly trained and gifted mediums who help us see that there is something within us as human beings called intuition, and it can give us information beyond our physical knowing. Share on X

The use of highly developed mediums in spiritism to help with diagnosis, and in some cases prognosis, in terms of what’s going to be the future for this person, and be on board to assist psychiatrists to complement the way the psychiatrist will look at someone who’s in distress, has been a tremendous amplification of the ability to be helpful for a person. Not only is that helpful. It can be transformative. Do we have time for me to tell a little story, Tim?

Please.

Marcelo’s Story: Misdiagnosed As Psychotic, Found Healing Through Intuitive Training

This story had a big impact on me. I tell it not because it’s the most unique story in the world, but because it tells very graphically what can happen and what has happened to a number of people that I have met in Brazil. This fellow has given me permission to tell his story. His first name is Marcelo. I call him Marcelo. At 28, he was a happy guy. He enjoyed his work. He enjoyed his circle of friends. He had a good relationship with his parents. He had no significant trauma in his life. Things were rolling along pretty well, but he had some depression.

His parents, both of them quite well-to-do because his father was a banker high up in the organization, sent him to one of the best psychiatrists in São Paulo. The guy said, “I think antidepressants are the way to go.” Marcelo complied, but he started feeling worse. He started to hear voices, sometimes five or six at the same time, all not making sense.

This was extremely upsetting for him. He also felt sensations in his body that he hadn’t felt before. He would say, “It felt like something was crawling over my body.” He would develop this way of trying to brush them off his body. To a conventionally trained nurse, psychiatrist, or psychologist, someone would say, “Those are symptoms that he’s probably psychotic and possibly schizophrenic.” With his parents’ advice to the psychiatrist, he was put into a psychiatric hospital and given antipsychotics.

Unfortunately, he kept feeling worse. There was no noticeable change in terms of his feeling better. At that point, his parents removed him from the psych hospital. After a period of time, which they hoped would help him relax and feel better, he was admitted to a spiritist psychiatric hospital. They went through what anyone would go through in one of our best psychiatric hospitals, which is being seen by a social worker and having a medical checkup. You notice what the stresses are on this particular person.

He was also seen by a medical intuitive, in other words, someone who had these highly developed and well-trained intuitive skills. That person realized that Marcelo was an energy healer in the rough, as it were. In other words, he needed training. He needed to harness his abilities. At this particular hospital in Palmelo, Brazil, there was a spiritist community around the hospital, which also gave trainings so that people like Marcelo, who were gifted, could learn how to do the energy work and could also be an apprentice to someone who could channel higher knowledge from highly evolved spirits.

I realize this can sound very odd to some people, but on the other hand, it will sound like a real possibility to others. This is an impartial answer to, “What are these other gifts that we have that we aren’t using?” Marcelo was in the hospital for a month while he was withdrawing from the antipsychotics and beginning to get training. Within a few months, he was out of the hospital, not because he ran away, but because he no longer needed to be there. He was living in the community, continuing to take training, and under supervision, going back into the psychiatric hospital to do energy work with the patients.

It put into a nutshell parts of stories that I had been able to hear firsthand from people who had also been diagnosed as psychotic or schizophrenic, had gone to spiritism for guidance and help. Because they were gifted, they had turned their lives around. I’m thinking about one man who was told he was schizophrenic and needed to be on medication, antipsychotics, for the rest of his life. He went into spiritism, learned more about his intuition and about these other abilities that he had, learned how to harness them, and is now teaching physics at a university without any antipsychotics.

By not looking at some of these potentials that people have, for instance, with intuition or with energy work, like Marcelo has a gift in that, we sometimes misdiagnose people who might be showing up with some very odd kind of behaviors, like Marcelo, hearing five or six voices and having the sense that rodents were on his arms and legs. We might be misdiagnosing them and saying categorically, “This looks like psychosis. This looks like schizophrenia. This person needs antipsychotics.” A person may need something for a while to attend to the anxiety they feel. Marcelo was calling himself crazy. The only way he could perceive what was going on in himself was, “I’m a crazy person.”

When we don’t acknowledge certain human potentials, like intuition, we sometimes misdiagnose people who show up with behaviors that seem odd or unusual. Share on X

Misdiagnosis And Suppressed Gifts: How To Train Spiritual Energies For Positive Transformation

“Nobody else I know has these hearings, these sightings, and these feelings.” The thing I want to point out is that what you’re saying is not only that we are misdiagnosing. We’re suppressing the energies that, as your story identifies, if we can train and teach people how to be aware of those energies, sometimes allow them, sometimes use them, then they flourish to come back to the word we want to use, flourishing as a human.

Not only are they flourishing, but if we again embroider on Marcelo’s story, he is in a position now to help other people. His gifts are in service to the community. That gives a whole other perspective. We are taking some people who may have the same kinds of symptoms, as we call them, such as Marcelo, and telling them they need to take medication for the rest of their lives. They should absolutely consider that they have a very simple life that is non-stressed and not working with other people so much because they can’t handle the stress. We remove them from the community.

We steal from the community that energy, which can be so helpful and healing.

We steal from a person who is a gifted individual who needs to learn and get some training.

The Profit Problem: Why Spiritism’s Free Model Clashes With U.S. Healthcare

The thing that in the beginning of your talking about that, the thought that came to my mind was, why don’t we hear more about spiritism here? There is something you’ve said once or twice already in this call. Spiritists don’t charge. Let that sink in. How is that going to fit in this model? What if you’ve got something effective at helping people, and then you can’t make a dime at it? How are you going to encourage that and encourage people to start schools and institutions in this culture where almost everything comes down to the bottom line of how much we are making in terms of money, and our healthcare system being profit-driven? It’s a real problem. It creates problems for us to deal with.

That’s a good thing to bring into the conversation as far as I’m concerned. I have been ruminating about this for 25 years. Can spiritism possibly fit into the American culture? It is a paradigm of care that is so far advanced from what we have, from my perspective. Certainly, that’s a stumbling block. Spiritists don’t charge anything for what they give. If it is to come into the United States, it will come in because of the conversations going on now about human flourishing and the desire to improve our medical healthcare system and our mental healthcare system, which are clearly showing signs of not working very well right now.

Spiritism will come to people’s attention through that avenue. If we create a spiritist center that charges something, that won’t be the end of the world. It’ll simply be Americanizing something. It may not function exactly like what happens in Brazil with the same outcomes, but it’s a step in the right direction. I don’t think that it would be helpful for any of us to say, “We can’t bring it to the United States because it’s free.”

I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that one of the things that may have suppressed it, and actively at an unconscious or conscious level, might be that this country seems devoted to the deity of money. We’ve got to have the almighty dollar. We’ve got to be making more. I don’t want to go down the path too far. I wanted to mention it because it came up. There’s this wonderful aspect of the work you’ve been experiencing in Brazil, which is the antidote to people over here who get taken advantage of. They have somebody who tells them, “Give me $400, and I’ll burn a candle on my shrine. It will cure your negative spirits or your arthritis.”

I’ve had people come through my caseload over 51 and a half years of doing therapy who pay more money to those people than they do to see me in therapy. They’re getting taken advantage of. In the spiritualist movement, where they offer what they’re doing without the requirement for payment or even a suggested donation, it removes that factor. You have this purity of intent and hopefully, purity of response and result, because it’s people connecting and trying to help each other as whole people.

That is beautifully said. In tribute to religious institutions, some people volunteer and give wholeheartedly.

Spiritual Emergence Vs. Spiritual Emergency: The Keys To Supporting A Spiritual Awakening

Aside from the money, that’s the biggest part of any good religion. Some people call them ministries that develop within the church community.

I’d like to mention two things. One, spiritism is sometimes misconceived as a religion. It is not. It’s a path of life which can lead to spiritual evolution, similar to something like Omega Institute or Esalen Institute, which are dedicated to human growth. That’s more in line with what it is. It’s not a religion. It’s not a cult. The other thing I wanted to say is that something that I’ve been profoundly focused on since 1980 is the notion of spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency.

 

These two terms were coined by a psychiatrist, Stan Grof, and his wife, Christina Grof. They recognized that some people have profound spiritual experiences. They are not being perceived for what they’re having. They’re being misperceived and often misdiagnosed. Marcelo is an example of that. He was having spiritual experiences. Initially, he was misdiagnosed. Other people are having different kinds of experiences. Some of them can be a near-death experience, as you mentioned earlier.

We have not trained our psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and coaches to understand what a spiritual experience is and how to support it so a person can evolve spiritually. In other words, continue to move on to higher and higher or more expanded states of consciousness. We also haven’t helped recognize what a spiritual emergency is. Think of Marcelo again. When he first started having these strange things going on, he was very disoriented. He thought, “The only thing that’s going on here is that I’m nuts.” He called himself crazy. As he became more educated and trained, he realized he was not crazy. He needed psych education as well as training.

We need to bring that knowingness of spiritual emergence and emergency to people who are in positions of coaching, counseling, and giving psychiatric care. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll move into graduate school. At this point, IMHU, what I founded and now run, Integrative Mental Health University, offers training for coaches, counselors, and psychologists. It offers continuing education. They can get to learn how to recognize spiritual experiences, learn how to support spiritual awakening or spiritual emergence, and learn how to be supportive of someone in a spiritual crisis or spiritual emergency, so that they can have the same positive transformation that Marcelo experienced.

That doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to turn into an energy worker, or they’re going to turn into a channeler or something. It might just mean that someone moves from being a person who is a little confused to a person who is profoundly satisfied with their life. IMHU is trying to fill in the gaps of education that people who went to medical school, graduate school in Psychology, nursing school, or coaching did not get. We are offering that. That has been a major part of my work in the world.

Empowering Youth: Navigating Mental Health Crises And Extreme States

I recognize that, looking at the time, there are four or five things I want to talk about. I had picked up my phone to read a section of your book that talks about how the energies that we’re talking about move faster than the speed of light. There’s research on that. However, because of time limitations, let me ask you to get centered, take a breath, and think about what we’ve covered so far. Is there a part of it you want to go back and highlight, or is there something else that we haven’t even touched on yet about your work or the IMHU that you want to bring forward in this talk?

One thing I’m working on right now is launching a new course that will be for youth, because from where I sit, there is clearly in the major media, telling us that adolescents, meaning teenagers and people who are young adults, are having a lot of problems. Mental health crisis is the word for it. I’ve been looking more closely into what is going on and what they might need. Some of what I can call the younger generation, because of my elder years, are highly sensitive and more in touch with these other aspects of the self, including intuition, than some of the elders are.

Many in the younger generation are highly sensitive and more in touch with other aspects of themselves, including intuition. Share on X

They have very little knowledge about how to deal with it. Sometimes, they feel overwhelmed and alone, and often isolate. That can lead to some deep psychological issues. Along with someone who has been a clinical psychologist who has taught at Cornell for 22 years and is specifically oriented toward young people who tend to hurt themselves, cut on themselves, and possibly have suicidal ideation, we have created a course that will be empowering for young people, so that they can learn some of these aspects of spirituality.

In other words, they may need to get acquainted with the other parts of themselves, as well as learn how to manage when they have psychological upsets. It’s by title, Empowering Youth to Navigate Extreme States. That will be launched in the next few days through IMHU. The site name to get to it is IMHU.org. If you think of the first four letters of “I’m human,” it’s IMHU.org. We are a nonprofit charitable organization.

I would ask for permission to reach out to you again in the not-too-distant future and have another conversation. As I’m working my way through the book, Spiritism and Mental Health, I can already see that we’ve got to almost a tiny fraction of what I was hoping we could talk about with some of the deeper understandings of the observations and the science that’s going into the spiritist movement. I thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. Thank you for the work you’re doing.

I appreciate the acknowledgement, Tim. Thank you for your interest. It’s an honor to be on your show.

Blessings.

—

Emma Bragdon is the founder and executive director of Integrative Mental Health University, to be found at IMHU.org. She earned her PhD in Transpersonal Psychology in 1987 and was licensed in California as a marriage, family, and child therapist in 1988. As a pioneer who has helped define the field of spiritual emergency, Emma has published seven books and co-produced two documentary films.

Within IMHU, Emma has trained over 130 spiritual emergence coaches who are available to support individuals, disoriented or in distress, as they open to their spirituality. She also leads a small group of healthcare providers to Brazil once a year to learn about the spiritist paradigm of mental healthcare from spiritist practitioners. Emma maintains a private practice consulting internationally via Zoom. See EmmaBragdon.com for personal consultations or IMHU.org for courses.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Emma Bragdon’s website
• Integrative Mental Health University
• Spiritism and Mental Health
• Lizards Eat Butterflies
• Store | IMHU | See Book and Film Descriptions and Get Links Here

 

About Emma Bragdon

Emma Bragdon is the Founder and Executive Director of Integrative Mental Health University, IMHU.org.

She earned her PhD in Transpersonal Psychology in 1987 and was licensed in California as a Marriage, Family, Child Therapist in 1988.

As a pioneer who has helped define the field of spiritual emergency, Emma has published 7 books and co-produced 2 documentary films. Within IMHU Emma has trained over 130 Spiritual Emergence Coaches• who are available to support individuals disoriented or in distress as they open spiritually.

She also leads a small group of healthcare providers to Brazil once a year to learn about the Spiritist paradigm of mental healthcare from Spiritist practitioners.  Emma maintains a private practice, consulting internationally via zoom.

See imhu.org/store for more info. on books/films. See EmmaBragdon.com for personal consultations. IMHU.org for courses.

 

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