Allen Lane, UK, 2021; ISBN 978-0-141-99103-0

Professor in the clinical psychology programme at Columbia University, Lisa Miller draws both on her research and her life in The Awakened Brain in order to show that a personal spirituality can have a wide range of mental health benefits. Key to her thesis, based in part on the outcomes of three epidemiological studies, is that depression and spirituality are often linked and that the key to combatting and warding off the former is to embrace the latter as part of everyday, lived, experience. By the end of the book Miller even goes so far as to assert, again based on her research, that having a spiritual outlook on life – which she also dubs ‘awakened awareness’ – can enhance cortical thickness and that this, in turn, can give added protection against depression. Such neurological ‘rewiring’ is found, she argues, in persons who are altruistic and who live their daily lives according to the ‘golden rule’ of loving others as they do themselves.

The golden rule is found, of course, across all creeds and cultures and the author makes clear throughout The Awakened Brain that awakened awareness is in no way the exclusive possession of any one religion or spiritual discipline. The crucial thing (although she doesn’t put it in quite this way) is that the spiritual outlook on life must be existential and not merely a matter of assenting to any number of faith propositions. There’s nothing terribly new here but then again there’s nothing terribly new in the argument that discerning meaning in life confers key psychological and survival benefits. Viktor Frankl made much the same points just after the close of World War Two in Man’s Search For Meaning and Carl Jung made clear more-or-less throughout his career as an analytical psychologist that a lack of meaning can give rise to a range of psychological maladies: including neuroses without any other clinically discernible cause. Much, in fact, as Frankl did. Jung gets a brief namecheck in The Awakened Brain when the author discusses synchronicities but other than that there’s no real acknowledgement that she’s treading an already well-trodden path. Having said that, Miller’s study makes a genuinely original contribution to the field in its use of the epidemiological studies to place its conclusions on firm, replicable, empirical grounds.

That spirituality heals is also unsurprising to anybody who has worked with testimonies to religious and spiritual experience. In fact, without actually using the word, Lisa Miller’s work is profoundly neurotheological and should rightly take its place as part of the burgeoning literature within that field. I found the semi-autobiographical style enjoyable and engaging too, turning a book that might have been dry and distant in its consistent use of experimental data into something that was anything but.

In places I was unconvinced, particularly by the chapter that sought to link synchronicities with quantum physics, but such overreach didn’t detract from the author’s aims in any significant way. In fact, I actually came away from this book profoundly uplifted and convinced that it should be essential reading for all mental health professionals. Early on the author shows how depression has reached near pandemic levels in Western society. That the antidote may be one which relies on neither medication nor ‘standard’ psychotherapeutic practices should be more widely known and The Awakened Brain does a fine job of popularising such an alternative for a generation that has never needed it more.

This review first appeared in The Christian Parapsychologist, New Series Vol 3 No 3, Autumn 2024