Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nisha Gupta is an existential phenomenologist, a depth psychotherapist, a creativity scholar, and an artist. She's an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia and earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. She's also, if she doesn't mind me saying, a bit of a rising star as an early career psychologist, having won early career awards from the APA divisions for both humanistic and qualitative psychology.
Dr. Gupta's work centers on lived experience and the problems of form and method in the field. She is an advocate of the psychological humanities, disseminating psychology to the public as art, including paintings, film, poetry, and literary memoir, for community healing and social change. Her artwork seeks to raise critical consciousness and empowerment regarding marginalized lived experiences, such as sexual and gender oppression, creative madness, and spiritual emergencies. In psychotherapy practice, she integrates depth and liberation psychotherapy perspectives.
In this conversation, we talk about phenomenological filmmaking and what film can capture about distress, identity, time, and relationships that often elude other approaches to psychological research. We also talk about spiritual emergency and the phrase "dark night of the soul," including the difference between those frameworks and the more familiar language of symptoms and disorders.
Dr. Gupta also shares her own experience of navigating a spiritual emergency as a clinical psychologist. We discuss what helped, what did not, what clinicians tend to miss in these situations, and what it would mean to build a better set of responses around people going through them.
Finally, we discuss liberation psychology and collective resilience, including the question of how to think about suffering when its sources are social and political, and how to avoid reducing resilience to individual "grit."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:14.9 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast. My guest today is Dr. Nisha Gupta. Dr. Gupta is an existential phenomenologist, a depth |
| 0:23.6 | psychotherapist, a creativity scholar, and an artist. She's an associate professor of psychology |
| 0:29.6 | at the University of West Georgia, and she earned her PhD in clinical psychology at Duquesne |
| 0:34.6 | University in Pittsburgh. She's also, if she doesn't mind me saying, |
| 0:38.7 | a bit of a rising star as an early career psychologist, having won early career awards from the APA |
| 0:46.0 | divisions for both humanistic and qualitative psychology. Dr. Gupta's work centers on lived experience |
| 0:51.8 | and the problems of form and method in the field. She's an advocate for the psychological humanities, |
| 0:57.0 | and she disseminates psychological research to the public |
| 1:00.0 | as art, paintings, film, poetry, and literary memoir, |
| 1:04.0 | and uses psychological research to promote community healing and social change. |
| 1:09.0 | Her artwork seeks to raise critical consciousness and empowerment regarding marginalized |
| 1:13.6 | lived experiences such as sexual and gender oppression, creative madness, and spiritual emergencies. |
| 1:20.6 | In this conversation, we'll talk about phenomenological filmmaking and what film can capture about distress, identity, time, relationships. We'll also talk about |
| 1:28.8 | spiritual emergency and the phrase dark night of the soul and explore the differences between |
| 1:33.3 | those frameworks and the more familiar diagnostic language of symptoms and disorders. Dr. Gupta |
| 1:38.4 | will also share her own experience of spiritual emergency for the first time publicly, and we'll |
| 1:43.0 | discuss what helped and what didn't it, what clinicians tend to miss in these situations, and what it would mean to build a better set of responses around people going through them. Finally, we'll talk about liberation psychology and collective resiliency, including the questions of how do we think about suffering, when its sources are social and political, how to avoid reducing resilience to individual grit so dr. Cooper wonderful to have you here thank you for |
| 2:04.1 | joining us on the Mad in America podcast it's an honor Justin to be in conversation |
| 2:08.4 | with you about such deep subject matters today did you start us off just by |
| 2:13.9 | of letting us know and letting our listeners know who you are. How did you become a depth |
| 2:18.4 | in liberation psychologist, a somewhat rare identity in the field? I want to be intentional of how I |
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