These three books document Māori healers and psychologists working alongside or within psychiatric and psychological practice. They bring frameworks like wairua (spirituality) and whānau into the room, rather than working strictly within a Western clinical model.
They aren’t a single therapeutic approach. They’re closer to an emerging body of work: practitioners and researchers documenting what Māori-informed mental health practice looks like as it takes shape.
This page contains Amazon affiliate links — if you buy a book through one, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Collaborative and Indigenous Mental Health Therapy: Tātaihono – Stories of Māori Healing and Psychiatry
Wiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush & David Epston, Routledge, 2017
Rather than case notes, this book is built from transcribed interviews documenting a bicultural partnership between traditional Māori healing and clinical psychiatry. NiaNia and Bush open by laying out their own worldview and the history of their working relationship. What follows are the stories of five young Māori and Pacific Islander patients experiencing psychosis-like distress with possible spiritual dimensions. Each is told from at least three perspectives: the psychiatrist’s, the healer’s, and the young person and family’s own.
NiaNia was apprenticed as a child to a spiritual healer within his own whānau and later became cultural therapist at Te Whare Mārie, the Māori mental health service in Porirua, where Bush works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Epston is a co-originator of narrative therapy, which shapes how each family’s story is structured on the page.
This is the book for a close, story-by-story look at what bicultural partnership actually looks like case by case. Recommended for clinicians who want to see the texture of individual cases play out, rather than a wider survey of how Māori psychological practice varies across practitioners.
Ngā Kūaha: Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry
Wiremu NiaNia, Allister Bush & David Epston, Routledge, 2022
Where the authors’ earlier book covered bicultural partnership broadly, this one narrows in on a single, specific phenomenon: hearing voices and seeing visions, and what that means from a Māori spiritual perspective versus a Western psychiatric one. NiaNia explains “ngā kūaha” as doorways, using the term to frame Māori knowledge of wairua (spirituality) passed down through his own forebears. The book then sets historical examples of Western mystical experience against psychiatry’s standard framing of voices and visions as hallucinations. Later chapters bring in the voices of people who’ve actually experienced this themselves, alongside their whānau, healers, and psychiatrists.
This book takes the same partnership from the first title and points it at one question: what do voices and visions mean, seen through both a Māori and a psychiatric lens at once? The narrower focus lets them go deeper into a single phenomenon than the broader case-by-case format of their earlier book allowed.
Te Manu Kai i te Mātauranga: Indigenous Psychology in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Edited by Waikaremoana Waitoki & Michelle Levy, New Zealand Psychological Society, 2016
Eighteen Māori psychologists each bring their own cultural worldview, whakapapa (lineage), and clinical experience to bear on the same shared case: Ripeka, a young Māori woman facing mental health challenges. Rather than presenting a single correct approach, the book uses that shared case to showcase how differently Māori psychological practice can proceed when it’s grounded in te ao Māori (a Māori worldview) instead of being filtered exclusively through a Western psychological lens.
Where the other two books on this page follow one relationship over time, this one asks what happens when you put 18 different Māori psychologists in the room with the same case.