Behind the Brazilian studies on mediums and psychography that are cited in consciousness research, the same name — and the same institution — usually appears. Alexander Moreira-Almeida (b. 1974), professor of psychiatry at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), has turned a fringe topic into a recognised academic field: the empirical study of spiritual experiences and their relevance to mental health. His research centre NUPES is today one of the world’s most visible addresses for "spirituality and health" — and the serious academic anchor behind much that elsewhere circulates only as anecdote.
The path of a psychiatrist
Moreira-Almeida was born on 28 March 1974 in Rio de Janeiro. He studied medicine at UFJF, completed his specialist training in psychiatry and behavioural therapy at the renowned Institute of Psychiatry of the University of São Paulo (USP), and earned his PhD in health sciences there. He then was a postdoctoral fellow in "religion and health" at Duke University in the US — one of the centres of this research branch. He thus combines what rarely comes together: a classical clinical psychiatric training and the methodological school of international religion-and-health research.
NUPES
At UFJF’s medical school he founded NUPES — Núcleo de Pesquisas em Espiritualidade e Saúde (Research Center in Spirituality and Health). The programme is deliberately broad and methodologically oriented:
- the relationship between religiosity/spirituality and mental and physical health,
- the empirical study of "anomalous" spiritual experiences (mediumship, past-life memories, near-death experiences),
- the question of what these phenomena mean for the relationship between consciousness and brain,
- and — unusually but centrally — the methodology, history and epistemology of this research field itself.
Moreira-Almeida has published over 190 papers in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters, together attracting more than 8,500 citations — figures that stand out far above the academic average for this topic.
Research line 1: Are mediums mentally ill?
His best-known topic is the distinction between mediumship and mental disorder. In a much-cited study of 115 spiritist mediums he found that, despite experiences that in a clinic would be hastily classified as psychotic or pathologically dissociative, they were overwhelmingly mentally healthy and socially well integrated — productive people with no signs of illness. In 2008 he also published a systematic comparison of Brazilian mediumship and dissociative identity disorder (DID), working out the clinically relevant differences.
The significance of this work is also practical: it provides arguments against automatically pathologising a spiritual experience — a position now echoed even in DSM-5, which does not classify dissociative experiences as inherently pathological.
Research line 2: Spirituality and mental health
Broader in scope is his work on whether religiosity and spirituality benefit mental health. In reviews — including clinical guidelines — he gathered the evidence that higher religious or spiritual involvement is on average associated with lower rates of depression, suicidality and alcohol and drug use. Here he stands on comparatively well-established ground; methodological caution (correlation is not causation, cultural confounding) is standard with him.
Research line 3: Mediumship in the brain
Moreira-Almeida is co-author of the best-known neuroimaging study on psychography: in 2012 a team led by Julio Peres and the US neuroscientist Andrew Newberg used SPECT to study ten mediums during automatic writing. Experienced mediums showed reduced frontal-lobe activity during trance, even though their texts were more complex — a finding that does not sit easily with the simple model "more output = more brain activity".
Research line 4: Consciousness, reincarnation and the big question
His theoretically most ambitious concern is the mind-brain problem. He argues against a premature reductionism ("consciousness is nothing but brain activity") and pleads for taking phenomena such as mediumship, memories of alleged past lives and near-death experiences seriously as data that a comprehensive model of consciousness would have to explain. The book he edited, Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship (2012), and the volume Spirituality and Mental Health Across Cultures (Oxford University Press) consolidate this approach. He thus stands in a line with the older Brazilian research tradition of Hernani Andrade — only with the tools and the institutional backing of today’s university medicine.
The institutional impact: the WPA position statement
Moreira-Almeida’s perhaps most consequential contribution is not a single study but a door-opener: as chair of the Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) (2014–2020) he coordinated the WPA Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry. It recommends systematically considering patients’ religious-spiritual dimension in diagnosis and treatment — an official signal from the world body that makes the integrative practice of Brazilian psychiatry academically connectable. He also chairs the corresponding sections of the Latin American (APAL) and Brazilian (ABP) psychiatric associations.
Assessment
What distinguishes Moreira-Almeida is his methodological precision: he does not prove that mediums speak with the dead or that reincarnation is real. He shows something more modest and more solid — that spiritual experiences are a legitimate, measurable research subject, that mediums are not categorically mentally ill, and that spirituality has health relevance. Where his work touches the big question of the survival of consciousness, he frames it as an open question, not a result.
Critics object that the selection and interpretation of the phenomena may have a worldview bias, and that controlled tests (such as a 2020 mediumship study with eight mediums and 94 "proxy sitters") did not demonstrate any supernatural ability. Both belong to the honest picture. It is precisely for that reason that his real achievement is less a single result than the creation of a framework in which such questions can be posed and tested cleanly at all — inside the university rather than outside it.
Sources
- Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia: Alexander Moreira-Almeida.
- Moreira-Almeida A, Lotufo Neto F, Cardeña E. Comparison of Brazilian Spiritist Mediumship and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 2008;196(5):420–424.
- Moreira-Almeida A et al. Clinical implications of spirituality to mental health: review of evidence and practical guidelines. 2014.
- Peres JF, Moreira-Almeida A, Caixeta L, Leuchsenring F, Newberg A. Neuroimaging During Trance State. PLoS ONE. 2012;7(11):e49360.
- Moreira-Almeida A, Santana de Santos F (eds.). Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship. Springer, 2012. — Moreira-Almeida A, Mosqueiro BP, Bhugra D (eds.). Spirituality and Mental Health Across Cultures. Oxford University Press.
- World Psychiatric Association: Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry (coordinated 2014–2020).
- Context: the SPECT study on psychography; Brazil’s spiritist psychiatry; Hernani Andrade and the IBPP.