Ngā Kūaha : Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry / Wiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush, David Epston.

1. IntroductionWiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush, David Epston2. TirohangaWiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush3. Ngā Tōpito o te AoWiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush, David Epston4. Voices and Visions in PsychiatryAllister Bush, Wiremu NiaNia5. EganEgan Bidois, Wiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush6. TohuWiremu NiaNia, Tohu, Tai Elkington, Peter Cowley, Allister Bush, David Epston7. GraceWiremu NiaNia, Hazel, Allister Bush, David Epston8. JakeWiremu NiaNia, Jake, Allister Bush, David Epston9. Ngā KūahaWiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush10. HuakinaWiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush, CalebEpilogueWiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush

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.