Ngā Kūaha

Ngā Kūaha: Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry explores what it means to hear voices and see visions from the perspectives of Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia and psychiatrist Allister Bush. Wiremu explains Ngā Kūaha as referring to doorways and offers entranceways into Māori knowledge about wairua (spirituality) handed down by his forebears and other Māori 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, whānau (family), Māori healing and psychiatry. The benefits of joint Māori 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 Māori 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 Māori cultural experiences, psychiatric or psychological symptoms, or all of these.

This book advocates for practices that enable genuine partnerships between Māori healers, other wairua practitioners and mental health clinicians in order to improve the mental health and spiritual care of Māori and perhaps other peoples.