"Whoever hears voices and believes they speak with the dead is ill" — that equation is old and convenient. In Brazil a psychiatrist did not merely assert it but measured it. Alexander Moreira-Almeida studied 115 Spiritist mediums — and found them mentally healthy, socially well integrated and above-average educated, despite experiences that elsewhere would reflexively be labelled psychotic.
The Psychiatrist and His Research Centre
Alexander Moreira-Almeida is a psychiatrist and professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), where he founded the research centre NUPES (Research Center in Spirituality and Health). He chaired the Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association. Important for context: this is mainstream academic psychiatry with peer-reviewed publication, not a worldview advocate — which is precisely why the findings carry weight.
The Study of 115 Mediums
In the study Dissociative and Psychotic Experiences in Brazilian Spiritist Mediums (with Francisco Lotufo Neto and the near-death researcher Bruce Greyson, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 2006), the researchers surveyed 115 Spiritist mediums with standardized instruments — including a social adjustment scale (SAS-SR), a psychiatric screening questionnaire (SRQ) and measures of dissociative and psychotic-like experiences as well as childhood trauma.
The result was clear: the mediums had a high socio-educational level, a low prevalence of mental disorders and were socially well adjusted — productive people with no signs of pathology. A subtlety is decisive: the mediums did report many unusual, partly dissociative and psychotic-like experiences. Yet the number of these experiences did not correlate with the markers of mental disorder (SAS-SR, SRQ, abuse history). In other words: having more "anomalous" experiences did not make anyone sicker. The experience itself is not a symptom.
Mediumship Is Not DID
In a companion study (Comparison of Brazilian Spiritist Mediumship and Dissociative Identity Disorder, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 2008) the team compared mediums directly with patients with dissociative identity disorder (DID). On the surface there are similarities — for instance the occurrence of Schneiderian first-rank symptoms. But the differences run deep: the mediums showed better social adjustment, a lower prevalence of mental disorders, no use of antipsychotics and far fewer histories of physical or sexual childhood abuse, as well as fewer borderline features. The mediumistic experience here is controlled, ego-syntonic and lived as meaningful — the opposite of the unwanted, distressing fragmentation of DID.
Experience Is Not Illness
Moreira-Almeida thereby hits a core point of modern diagnostics: under DSM and ICD an unusual experience alone is not yet a disorder — that requires distress or impairment of functioning. Precisely those are absent in well-functioning mediums. His work fed into the international debate on distinguishing non-pathological spiritual from psychotic experiences, up to contributions to the ICD-11. Where the physician Bezerra de Menezes in the 19th century still wrote from spiritist doctrine about "madness under a new prism", Moreira-Almeida supplies the empirical evidence — and how thin the line between gift and diagnosis can be is shown by the case of a medium in psychiatry.
One thing remains important: this finding says nothing yet about where the content of mediumistic experiences comes from. It says only — and that is a lot — that the widespread equation "medium = mentally ill" does not hold up empirically.
The Larger Question
Moreira-Almeida does not stop at mental health. He was part of the team of the SPECT study of psychographic mediums (Peres, Newberg et al., PLoS ONE 2012) and explicitly regards the question of the relationship between consciousness and brain as empirically open rather than settled. His style throughout is that of a careful clinician: measure first, then interpret.
What Remains
Moreira-Almeida's work is a model of the stance this site follows: a psychiatry that neither romanticizes mediumistic experiences nor reflexively pathologizes them, but examines them. That of all places Brazil, with its institutionally anchored mediumship, became the laboratory for this question is no accident — here there were enough healthy, well-studiable mediums to refute the old equation cleanly.
Sources
- Moreira-Almeida, A., Lotufo Neto, F., Greyson, B. (2006): Dissociative and Psychotic Experiences in Brazilian Spiritist Mediums. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 76(1), 57–58 — 115 mediums, high educational level, low disorder prevalence, good social adjustment.
- Moreira-Almeida, A., Lotufo Neto, F., Cardeña, E. (2008): Comparison of Brazilian Spiritist Mediumship and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 196(5), 420–424.
- Moreira-Almeida, A. et al.: contributions on the differential diagnosis of non-pathological spiritual vs. psychotic experiences (ICD-11 context); NUPES / UFJF.
- Peres, J. F., Moreira-Almeida, A., Caixeta, L., Leão, F., Newberg, A. (2012): Neuroimaging during Trance State. PLoS ONE 7(11): e49360 — see mediumship in Brazil.