Presentation by Dr Navneet Johri - Spirituality and Mental Health. Presented at the Western Australian Mental Health Conference 2019.

1. Spirituality and Mental Health
Dr. Navneet Johri
Senior Clinical Lecturer UWA-MBBS, DPM, MD, FRANZCP
Consultant Psychiatrist
1) Bibra Lake Specialist Centre- private practice &
2) Headspace Early Psychosis Joondalup
20th November 2019 WAAMH Conference

2. Spirituality is (and) Mental Health
✤ Spirituality is regarded as an essential mental health
and wellbeing dimension by WHO-QOL definition

3. 3 parts to this talk
1. Evidence (it’s scope) and definitions of spirituality
2. Objective vs Subjective (lessons from and for basic sciences)
3. Introduction to Advait (Non Dual) Philosophy

4. 1. Evidence (it’s scope) and definitions of spirituality

5. Scope of Evidence
Traditional Sciences
✤ Seemingly Objective:
If I see it, you should
also see it
(replicability)
✤ Our search for truth
(basic physics,
chemistry and
biology) is an external
search.
✤ Assumption that we
will find something
outside ourselves
Spiritual domain
✤ Everything that happens
is internal- our private
internal world
✤ Includes first person
experience (thoughts,
feelings, desires
intentions, tendencies)
✤ Evidence: I can see it
within myself and you can
too
Misleading Entities
 Only I can experience it
and no one else
 OR you can experience it
too, but only after death
(heavens)
 This could still be true
but clearly there is no
evidence
Evidence within Spiritual Framework is possible

6. “Contemporary medicine is perhaps best characterised by as
technomedicine, a mood boggling outcome of Spencerian
tradition, rushing onwards and upward to a Utopia where
health is understood purely in terms of biology, tamed
through technological intervention and maintained by
responsible individuals.
In techno medicine the questions related to moral and
spiritual side of individual are considered merely as frills of
culture and have no place in an economically driven
scientific regime”
–Margaret Lock

7. Spirituality: Some Definitions
✤ The Special Interest Group of RCP
✤ The essentially human, personal and interpersonal dimension, which
integrates and transcends the cultural, religious, psychological, social and
emotional aspects of the person, or, more specifically, concerned with
soul or spirit.
✤ Royal College of Psychiatrist 2006
✤ In healthcare, spirituality is identified with experiencing a deep-seated
sense of meaning and purpose in life, together with a sense of
belonging. It is about acceptance, integration and wholeness.

8. Spirituality: Definition contd..
✤ In every human being there seems to be a spiritual dimension,
✤ a quality that goes beyond religious affiliation, that strives for
inspiration, reverence, awe, meaning and purpose, even in those
who do not believe in God
✤ The spiritual dimension tries to be in harmony with the universe,
strives for answers about the infinite, and comes essentially into
focus in times of emotional stress, physical and mental illness, loss,
bereavement and death.
Murray & Zentner, 1989)

9. “We join spokes together in a wheel,
But it is the centre hole,
That makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
But it is the emptiness inside,
That holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for house,
But it is the inner space
That makes it livable
We work with being,
But non being is what we use”
Tao Te Ching
English translation by Stephen Mitchell

10. 2. Objective vs Subjective
(lessons from and for basic sciences)

11. We cannot claim that Consciousness (you the self)
arises from Matter

12. “Hard problem of Consciousness”
✤ The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific
puzzles.
✤ Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it
arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we
ever will.
✤ Astronomers wonder what dark matter is, geologists seek the origins of life,
and biologists try to understand cancer—all difficult problems, of course,
yet at least we have some idea of how to go about investigating them and
rough conceptions of what their solutions could look like.
✤ Our first-person experience, on the other hand, lies beyond the traditional
methods of science.
✤ Philosopher David Chalmers: coined this term- ‘hard problem of
consciousness’

13. Or “The hard problem of Matter?”
✤ Consciousness is not uniquely troublesome.
✤ Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have
struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter.
✤ What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical
structure described by physics?
✤ This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science,
because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—
the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.”
✤ On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look
reveals that they might be deeply connected.

14. “there is a strong parallelism between concepts of reality,
Brahman and Shunyata in the eastern religious scriptures
and modern physics. These scriptures describe Brahman
as the universal cosmic consciousness. It is manifested in
some form in every object of the universe. ”

15. Does Religion offer any benefits?
Koenig et al, 2001; Huguelet & Koenig, 2009).
Faith expressed
through religious
affiliation &/or other
forms of spiritual
identification
• Wellbeing
• Illness
prevention
• Health recovery
• Ability to cope
Positive
correlation
100 Studies

16. ✤ Research has also not shown that lack of spiritual/religious
inclination results in disease

17. 3. Introduction to Advait (Non Dual) Philosophy

20. Are you an object in front of the lenses of your own
perception?
-Mooji (Adwaitin Master)
Or, are you a subject behind the 5 perceptual lenses +
thoughts (“mind”)?
Or Both?
Or Beyond?

21. ✤ Once, if this can be convincingly sorted out, humans (individuals)
and society, will live an infinitely peaceful existence; and a lot of
unknown, in terms of basic sciences and medical sciences will
be solved! (It’s a bold claim!)
✤ “This”: the person constantly seeking answers and asking
questions- most quintessential questions to most mundane..is an
object in front of a BASIC sense of AWARENESS..

22. Case Scenario

23. Spiritual Therapy- a novel modality
of psychotherapy
1. Symposium
presented at
RANZCP Annual
Congress
Auckland May
2018 &
2. World
Psychiatric
Congress
Melbourne Feb
2018

24. Spiritual Therapy App (iOS store)

25. Email interests or queries/fe
Navneet.johri@blsc.