Wiremu NiaNia

Nga Kuaha: Voices and Visions in Maori Healing and Psychiatry explores what it means to hear voices and see visions from the perspectives of Maori healer Wiremu NiaNia and psychiatrist Allister Bush. Wiremu explains Nga Kuaha as referring to doorways and offers entranceways into Maori knowledge about wairua (spirituality) handed down by his forebears and other Maori 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, whanau (family), Maori healing and psychiatry. The benefits of joint Maori 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 Maori 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 Maori cultural experiences, psychiatric or psychological symptoms or all of these. This book advocates for practices that enable genuine partnerships between Maori healers, other wairua practitioners and mental health clinicians in order to improve the mental health and spiritual care of Maori and perhaps other peoples.

Nga Kuaha: Voices and Visions in Maori Healing and Psychiatry explores what it means to hear voices and see visions from the perspectives of Maori healer Wiremu NiaNia and psychiatrist Allister Bush. Wiremu explains Nga Kuaha as referring to doorways and offers entranceways into Maori knowledge about wairua (spirituality) handed down by his forebears and other Maori 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, whanau (family), Maori healing and psychiatry. The benefits of joint Maori 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 Maori 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 Maori cultural experiences, psychiatric or psychological symptoms or all of these. This book advocates for practices that enable genuine partnerships between Maori healers, other wairua practitioners and mental health clinicians in order to improve the mental health and spiritual care of Maori and perhaps other peoples.

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Maori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcribed interviews and detailed meditations on practice, it demonstrates how bicultural partnership frameworks can augment mental health treatment by balancing local imperatives with sound and careful psychiatric care. In the first chapter, Maori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his worldview and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The main body of the book comprises chapters that each recount the story of one young person and their family’s experience of Maori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Maori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing. With a foreword by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies.

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Maori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcribed interviews and detailed meditations on practice, it demonstrates how bicultural partnership frameworks can augment mental health treatment by balancing local imperatives with sound and careful psychiatric care. In the first chapter, Maori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his worldview and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The main body of the book comprises chapters that each recount the story of one young person and their family’s experience of Maori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Maori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing. With a foreword by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies.