5th December 2025, 11:00 - 12:30

Online via MS Teams

Speakers:

• Dr Katja Milner
• Rachel Cummings

Dr Katja Milner

Mystery and Mental Health: Mythos and meaning in spirituality and mental health recovery stories

Research has demonstrated that spirituality can form an important part of mental health and recovery and that many people would like to have this dimension addressed within mental healthcare contexts. However, a 'spirituality gap' has been highlighted in which people's spiritual needs can often be invalidated, dismissed or pathologised within clinical practice.
This presentation outlines salient findings from a PhD conducted at the University of Nottingham exploring lived experience accounts of the role of spirituality in mental health and recovery (supervised by Paul Crawford, Mike Slade and Alison Edgley). An initial qualitative systematic review (MISTIC study, Milner et al., 2020) revealed meaning making to be a key theme within existing literature exploring experiences of spirituality and mental health. A subsequent narrative study explored specifically how people make meaning and its potential functionality in these contexts.
Spiritual meaning making emerged as a fundamental component of many participants’ recovery narratives and was often characterised as having symbolic, liminal, mystical or mythical elements. Such ‘mythos’ frameworks were contrasted and juxtaposed with more logical, rational, or scientific ‘logos’ approaches to sense-making, yet both were identified as essential to understanding spiritual and mental health experiences. Mythos meaning making was described as playing a key role in internal spiritual guidance, helping participants navigate and discern the sometimes confusing, harrowing, yet wisdom-inducing terrains of their recovery journeys.
Findings of this research suggest that contrary to the stigma and pathologisation which often surround subjective spiritual and mental health experiences, understanding and validation of these same experiences can hold important keys to healing, recovery and psychospiritual development.

Rachel Cummings

Mystery and End of Life Care

This talk will focus on an aspect of the dying experience often well-known to those working within palliative care, but little discussed beyond: so-called ‘deathbed experiences’. These are events occurring in the last weeks or days of life understood in terms of metaphysical or relational value, when material explanations are possible.
Examples include a dying person seeing a deceased loved one at the bedside, talking as if on a journey, waving to people others cannot see, seeing or hearing children playing and accurately predicting their time of death. They can also refer to those events reported by people around the dying: visions of bright lights or something emanating from the dying body as well as reports of meaningful coincidences - someone dying on a significant day, a clock stopping at the moment of death or a white feather falling inexplicably from the sky.
For many, these moments are deeply meaningful. They speak to the profound significance and an often ineffable transcendence that people seek in the dying phase. Such moments mark a transition from profane to sacred and the dying person’s liminal status as both in this world and already elsewhere. For others they are simply a materialist feature of dying, caused by opioid toxicity, delirium, electrolyte imbalances, malignant spread of disease to the brain, psychosis, psychological distress or cognitive error.
This presentation will consider the tension between these two forms of explanation. Based on a seven-month ethnography of a hospice in-patient unit and 42 interviews with palliative care professionals it will explore when and by whom alternative understandings exist within the clinical space and their consequences for both clinical knowledge and patient care

Join the meeting now