‘Spiritual’ Help Is Just a Phone Call Away : Mental health: ‘Crisis’ hot lines offer counseling and refer callers to therapists, gurus and priests. Mainstream practitioners are skeptical.

After unsuccessful attempts to contact the President, a man with premonitions of a “Kadafi attack” on America wants to speak to someone who will believe him.

A worried mother has just heard the latest psychic prediction of when the big earthquake will hit. Is there time to get her family out of California?

A 60-year-old woman, convinced that a male witch is trying to ruin her life, needs the phone number of an exorcist.

Whether mystical, magical, occult or just extraordinary, the dilemma has probably been heard at one of California’s “spiritual crisis” hot lines: the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN) in Menlo Park and Heartline in Woodland Hills.

The services, which together handle more than 150 calls each week, might prompt some to sigh and suggest anew that there are no limits to the idiosyncrasies of California living and thinking. There is certainly skepticism about them in the mental health community.

But the hot lines, proponents argue, raise deeper, important issues about modern society, religious beliefs and mental health. Reduced to its simplest, the function of these hot lines raises the question: Should everyone who acts or speaks in an illogical manner, who undergoes a seemingly inexplicable experience, be considered mentally ill? Or should paranormal behavior and experiences be treated as spiritual or religious revelations?

This is no idle query at a time when, in the search for mental, physical and spiritual well-being, many Americans have turned to non-Western religious and metaphysical practices, such as Sufism and Kundalini Yoga, as well as Christian mysticism. It’s also a time when “New Age” ideas--such as the healing properties of crystals, astral projection and channeling--have grown in popularity.

Those who run the hot lines assert that many mainstream mental health experts are too quick to label unusual behavior as psychotic. Instead, they contend, such conduct might simply indicate that an individual is undergoing a little-understood “spiritual awakening” that may lead to natural mental and physical healing.

For many callers, contact with the Spiritual Emergence Network offers “the first time they’ve been listened to and haven’t been called crazy,” said SEN director Jeneane Prevatt.

SEN, she explained, is an information and referral network with 22 regional offices in the United States and 21 in other countries. In Menlo Park, one full-time and one part-time employee answer phones with help from volunteers.

Callers fall into two categories, staffers say. Some seek guidance in their spiritual quests. Others relate experiences involving strange, inexplicable phenomena. Some callers complain of being possessed by everything from demons to displaced spirits to meddling acquaintances, said Daisy Spiegel, SEN’s Los Angeles regional coordinator.

When answering such calls, Spiegel said she first tries to determine whether the callers “want to look within themselves.”

Callers who want an exorcism are referred to the Healing Light Center, a metaphysical church in Glendale where trained healers believe they can cure spiritual and physical ailments by placing their hands on people.

But if the caller seeks more immediate advice, Spiegel, a licensed clinical social worker and family counselor, said she will talk with “the voices” to help the person who hears them discover what may be causing them to be “possessed.”

Callers are referred to traditional religious and medical sources as well as alternative practitioners, Prevatt said.

The network first directs callers to its regional coordinators. If none exists in their area, they are directed to specialists, such as a therapist, guru, Indian medicine man, nun or priest.

SEN requires its regional coordinators to be licensed therapists who know psychiatrists to whom they can refer callers. But Prevatt concedes that the network’s $80,000 annual budget prohibits the screening of specialists. She said callers are informed of this and advised to use their best judgment.

Unlike SEN, Heartline, which gets half a dozen calls weekly, counsels some of its callers over the phone, said its director, Mark Waldman.

What happens when someone uses the hot lines? The answer varies.

A 28-year-old woman counseled by Heartline praised the service, saying it helped her come to terms with her strong affinity for God. But the woman’s mother assailed Heartline, blaming it for her daughter’s refusal to get psychiatric help.

The mother said that her daughter told her last November that she was a Christ and that Jesus and other spirits spoke through her. The mother flew to Los Angeles from New York City to try to bring her daughter back East.

But because of her mental state, the daughter had to be put in a hospital, where a psychiatrist tentatively diagnosed her as suffering from manic-depressive psychosis, the mother said, adding, “We don’t really know what’s wrong with her . . . she never avails herself of (long-term) psychiatric monitoring.”

While hospitalized, the daughter said a friend suggested that she try Heartline. She called Waldman and he helped her understand, she said, that she was “a person with a strong spiritual affinity for God.” He helped boost her self-esteem and her ability to tell her doctor about what she was experiencing.

The woman has been released from the hospital and now lives in a Los Angeles apartment where she spends time alone talking to “spirit guides” who, she said, are healing her.

Waldman said he told the woman not to try to heal herself and recommended religious and spiritual workshops. “The best we can do is be there during an emotional crisis, give good referrals and hope that is enough,” he said.

But the woman’s mother is furious with Heartline because, she said, its counselors are “predisposed” to think her daughter is “a channeler. All they do is validate the illness without considering it as an illness. That’s denial.”

The hot lines can be traced to the work of psychologists and medical researchers who, in the 1960s, began investigating out-of-the-ordinary mental states and how spiritual crises affect physical and mental health. Among them are Dr. Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist who has spent 30 years researching “nonordinary states of consciousness,” and Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean-born psychiatrist and author, said Russ Brown, SEN research coordinator.

Although their theories differed, the researchers generally agreed that treating people’s minds and bodies but not their “spiritual well-being” could keep patients from getting and being healthy, Brown said.

SEN and Heartline hope to address this issue.

In an effort to influence the mental health Establishment and to establish the scientific validity of what it calls the spiritual awakening processes, SEN keeps records of its calls. These will be made available to scholars and researchers, although callers’ identities will be kept secret, Brown said.

Ultimately, he said, SEN organizers hope that a definition of “psycho-spiritual crisis” will be recognized by the mainstream psychiatric community. They hope it will be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard reference used by psychiatrists in diagnosing mental states.

But many traditional mental health experts express skepticism about theories espoused by SEN and Heartline.

American Psychiatric Assn. officials would not discuss SEN or Heartline but provided a statement repeating its position that therapists should separate their own beliefs from those of their patients.

Dr. Dennis J. Munjack, director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at County-USC Medical Center, acknowledged that experts may find it difficult to differentiate between psychosis and cultural and religious experiences.

Nonetheless, he believes that if care is taken, there is little likelihood of misdiagnosis.

For those who do not want to go the route of traditional medicine, however, SEN and Heartline offer a service, said Waldman, Heartline’s director.

The popular suggestion that many of these ancient, complicated belief systems and religions can be mastered or even understood quickly promotes problems, he said, adding, “People are opening doors of the unconscious mind that are usually shut very tight and they don’t know what to do next.”

This problem is compounded in Los Angeles, where seekers may turn to greedy spiritual guides and gurus who themselves are often lost, he said.

But Mary Jo Meadows, a certified clinical psychologist and director of religious studies at Mankato State University in Minnesota, expressed doubts about the growing number of people who claim to have undergone spiritual experiences.

True spiritual growth, she said, comes from study and long, hard practice--the sort of seeking, self-discipline and piety, for example, that she sees in serious students of Buddhism and Hinduism.

Instead, she said, “spirituality nowadays means having exciting, altered experiences. The lifestyles of most of the people claiming to have these experiences are self-indulgent and not compatible with spiritual lifestyles. Genuine spiritual work must be built on a solid moral base.”