Ng Kaha

Ng Kaha: Voices and Visions in Mori Healing and Psychiatry explores what it means to hear voices and see visions from the perspectives of Mori healer Wiremu NiaNia and psychiatrist Allister Bush. Wiremu explains Ng Kaha as referring to doorways and offers entranceways into Mori knowledge about wairua (spirituality) handed down by his forebears and other Mori sources. The authors provide historical examples of Western mystical experiences and contrasting Western psychiatric and psychological explanations of voices and visions as hallucinations. Further chapters focus on narratives and perspectives from people who have experienced voices and visions, and have had interactions with mental health services, told from multiple viewpoints; individual, whnau (family), Mori healing and psychiatry. The benefits of joint Mori healing and psychiatry approaches on wellbeing are examined. Drawing on their 18-year partnership, Wiremu and Allister highlight the harmful colonial impact of psychiatry in suppressing Mori views of voices and visions. They describe ways of working together in clinical practice to address this history of injustice and how to identify whether distressing perceptual experiences may represent Mori cultural experiences, psychiatric or psychological symptoms or all of these. This book advocates for practices that enable genuine partnerships between Mori healers, other wairua practitioners and mental health clinicians in order to improve the mental health and spiritual care of Mori and perhaps other peoples.