1st Edition

The Entanglement of Culture and Psychosis Perspectives Across Disciplines and Experiences

Edited By Ingo Lambrecht, Anna Lavis Copyright 2026
282 Pages
by Routledge

282 Pages
by Routledge

Featuring contributions from a variety of international voices, this volume draws on a range of disciplinary, practice and experiential perspectives to offer new understandings of relationships between culture and psychosis.  

Taking neither culture nor psychosis as neatly defined, the chapters trace how individual illness and recovery experiences, treatment paradigms, and diagnostic categories are all culturally shaped. Together they illustrate that paying attention to culture is crucial to understanding the complexities of lived experiences, as well as the workings of culture in biomedicine and psychiatry. Offering a sensitive and multi-vocal approach to the topic, the book is an innovative, timely and theoretically robust contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mental health science.  

This important book will be of interest to mental health practitioners, students and academics across a range of disciplines, as well as those with lived experience of psychosis. 

About the editors 

List of contributors  

 
 

Introduction: Reflecting on the Entanglement of Culture and Psychosis 

Ingo Lambrecht and Anna Lavis 

 

Section One: From the Individual to the Cultural: Subjectivity and Experience in Context 

 

Chapter One: Introduction to Culture and Hallucinations 

T.M. Luhrmann 

 

Reprint of Culture and Hallucinations: Overview and Future Directions  

Frank Larøi, T.M. Luhrmann, Vaughan Bell,  

William A. Christian Jr, Smita Deshpande, Charles Fernyhough,  

Janis Jenkins and Angela Woods  

 

Chapter Two: The Intersect between Heavy Metal Music Culture and Experiences of ‘Psychosis’ 

Kate Quinn and Angela Glaves 

 

Chapter Three: Hallucinations, Delusions and Psychotic Experience in the Arab World 

Justin Thomas, Mariapaola Barbato and Alaa Galadari 

 

Chapter Four: Mysticism and Madness: A Matter of Perspective? 

Marilyn Charles 

 

Chapter Five: Visionary Reality, Culture and Psychosis: Dialogues with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow)   

David R. Kopacz and Joseph Rael 

  

Chapter Six: Tino Rangatiratanga (Self-determination) 

Mel Taitimu 

 

Chapter Seven: Psychosis as an Extreme State: Some Reflections from an Edge 

Ingo Lambrecht 

 

Section Two: Collective Psyches: Culture, Society and Environment 

 

Chapter Eight: Heralded Kupu o te Wairua  

Rāwiri Patterson 

 

Chapter Nine: Cultural Ruptures and their Consequences for Mental Health across Generations: The Case of Ireland 

Michael O’Loughlin 

 

Chapter Ten: Racism and me: A Poem and Reflection on the Relationship between Racism and Psychosis  

Hári Sewell  

 

Chapter Eleven: What’s in a Word – Schizophrenia or Psychosis, Vulnerability or Sensitivity, Recovery or Discovery? 

Andrew Moskowitz 

 

Chapter Twelve: Hearing Distressing Voices, Climate Change, and Moral Agency among Maasai Women of Northern Tanzania 

Neely Myers 

 

Chapter Thirteen: Freedom 

Vanessa Sinclair 

 

Section Three: Healing Systems and Recovery across Contexts 

 

Chapter Fourteen: Mental Health and Healing in Former French African Colonies 

Essosinam Ward 

 

Chapter Fifteen: Cassandra’s Prophetic Knowledge: Trauma, Psychosis, and Culture 

Johanna C. Malone 

 

Chapter Sixteen: An Interdisciplinary Critique of Culture, Psychosis and Stigma in Singapore   

Christopher Devan and Gangadharan Sathyadevan 

 

Chapter Seventeen: Kundalini and Psychosis: A Personal Journey with Some Clinical Reflections 

Balveer Sikh 

 

Chapter Eighteen: The Othering Culture of Western Biological Psychiatry 

Vanessa Beavan 

 

Chapter Nineteen: Possession in Psychiatric Hospitals: Psychosis and Culture in Rural India 

Florence Halder 

 

Afterword: A Culture of Madness 

Debra Lampshire 

 

Index 

Biography

Ingo Lambrecht is a consultant clinical psychologist in Auckland, New Zealand. His special interests include children, psychosis, personality issues, trauma. He has also worked at a Māori Mental Health Service and in other leadership roles, implementing indigenous models of care that address social inequities. He was also privileged to undergo an intense shamanic training as a sangoma, a South African traditional healer, as outlined in his book, Sangoma Trance States, based on his PhD research. 

 

Anna Lavis is an Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research has two core strands: lived experiences of mental (ill-)health and distress - notably disordered eating, self-harm, suicidality and psychosis - and relationships between social media and mental health. She has published widely in social science and clinical journals and is the series editor of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) Book Series.