Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health: Exploring Connections

This book emphasizes the integral connections between imagination, creativity, and spirituality and their role in healing. First, the author highlights the work of a neglected yet important psychoanalyst, Marion Milner - a painter and undeclared mystic - expanding her work on creativity, mysticism, and mental health. Second, she explores imagination and creativity as expressed in fostering hope and in spiritually-oriented therapies, particularly for mood, anxiety, and eating disorders - offering practical application of studies in imagination and the arts. Raab Mayo concludes that both creativity and the potential for transcendence are inherent in the human psyche and can work as allies in the process of recovery from mental illness.

Kelley Raab Mayo is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Ottawa, with a cross-appointment in Classics and Religious Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Ottawa, with a specialization in psychology of religion. In 2005 she was ordained a minister in the United Church of Christ, expanding her research into the area of pastoral theology in a mental health context. Dr Raab Mayo has published articles on mysticism, creativity, and mental health in such journals as the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and Mental Health, Religion and Culture. She works as a chaplain at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.