Yale, a PhD, and a Medium Walk Into a Bar...

Yale and Harvard Are Finally Saying What Mediums Have Known for Decades

On April 21, 2026, Yale School of Medicine published an article announcing a new programme within their Department of Psychiatry. Its name: the Programme for Spirituality, Mental Health, and the Brain.

I read it. I read it twice. And then I sat back in my chair and thought: welcome to the party, Yale. We saved you a seat.

Because here is the thing. I have been the bridge between spiritual gifts and mental health for over 20 years. Dr. Emma Bragdon, a transpersonal psychologist in Vermont, has been doing it for over 40 years. And now, in 2026, one of the most prestigious universities in the world has announced — with the gravitas that only an Ivy League institution can muster — that maybe, just maybe, spirituality and mental health belong in the same conversation.

I could not agree more. I could also not help but smile. Because this is a little bit like someone inventing the wheel and announcing it to a room full of people who have been driving cars for decades.

But let me be fair. Let me be generous. And let me explain why this actually matters — for you, for the field, and for everyone who has ever been told that their spiritual experiences were symptoms rather than gifts.

What Yale Is Actually Doing

Yale's new programme is a collaboration between the Department of Psychiatry and the Yale Divinity School. It is led by Dr. Christopher Pittenger, a professor of psychiatry, alongside Dr. Anna Yusim, Dr. Marc Potenza, and historian Dr. Bruce Gordon.

Their stated goal is refreshingly honest: they want to figure out a shared language for talking about spiritual experience within academic psychiatry. They hold monthly meetings where people from different backgrounds — neuroscientists, psychiatrists, divinity scholars, historians — sit in a room and try to understand each other.

In their own words, they are trying to take spiritual experience as seriously as they take pain, love, and alienation — things that are invisible, unmeasurable, but obviously real and important.

Dr. Pittenger said something in the Yale article that I want to highlight because it is extraordinary coming from a neuroscientist at an Ivy League institution:

"If something is a part of people's mental health and a source of both resilience and suffering, then we need to figure out a way to embrace and talk about it."

I agree with every word. I have been embracing and talking about it since 2006. But better late than never.

What Emma Bragdon Has Been Doing for 40 Years

Before Yale started having polite monthly conversations about spirituality and the brain, a woman named Dr. Emma Bragdon was already doing the work — with her hands dirty, in the field, at the intersection that Yale is just now discovering.

Dr. Bragdon is a transpersonal psychologist. She founded IMHU — the Integrative Mental Health University — and has spent over 40 years bridging spiritual experience and mental health care. She has published seven books, produced two documentaries, and spent years studying Spiritist psychiatric hospitals in Brazil — places where psychiatrists and mediums literally collaborate on diagnosis and treatment.

Read that again. In Brazil, psychiatrists and mediums work side by side in hospitals. They have been doing this for over 120 years. It is funded by the government. It is mainstream healthcare. And the outcomes, particularly for addiction and suicidality, are remarkable.

Dr. Bragdon is also, like me, a clairvoyant who grew up without support for her gift. She describes having clairsentience and clairvoyance from birth and learning to develop them through decades of training.

The difference between Dr. Bragdon and Yale is simple: she does not just talk about the intersection. She works in it. She trains healthcare professionals to recognise spiritual emergence. She coaches gifted people through crises. She has been doing this since before many of the Yale researchers were born.

What I Have Been Doing for 20 Years

And then there is me. Kim Lessage. Not a PhD. Not an Ivy League professor. Not someone who gets quoted in academic journals.

Just a clairvoyant who grew up in a family that worked for a psychiatric hospital. Who was told by her own parents — who were not mental health professionals, by the way — that her spiritual experiences were a mental disorder. Who spent years hiding her gift, suppressing her perceptions, and paying the price in isolation and self-doubt.

And who, in 2006, decided to stop hiding and start teaching.

I have spent 20 years working at the exact intersection that Yale just discovered. Not in a laboratory. Not in a monthly discussion group. In the living rooms, phone calls, and video sessions of real people who are suffering right now because nobody told them the difference between a spiritual gift and a mental illness.

I work with the teenager who hears voices and thinks she is schizophrenic — when actually she has clairaudience. I work with the mother whose child sees deceased people and does not know whether to call a doctor or a priest. I work with the 45-year-old man who has spent his entire adult life on medication for experiences that were never symptoms — they were perceptions.

Yale is having monthly conversations. Dr. Bragdon is training professionals. I am in the trenches with the gifted people themselves. We are all needed. But let us be honest about who has been here the longest.

The Statistic That Should Make Everyone Uncomfortable

Here is a number from the Yale article that should sit in your chest for a while:

Only 10% of psychiatrists ask their patients about their spiritual beliefs.

Let me say that differently. 90% of psychiatrists do not ask. Nine out of ten. The overwhelming majority of mental health professionals responsible for diagnosing and treating people whose experiences may include spiritual perception... never ask whether those experiences might be spiritual.

Imagine going to a doctor with a broken leg, and the doctor never asks if you have been in an accident. Imagine describing a rash, and the doctor never asks if you have been exposed to anything. That is what is happening — except the stakes are higher, because the wrong diagnosis does not just fail to help. It actively harms.

People who have spiritual gifts are being diagnosed with psychosis, anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, and personality disorders — not because they have these conditions, but because the professional assessing them has no framework for distinguishing spiritual perception from mental illness.

I have a framework. I have had one for 20 years. It fits in one sentence:

A mental disorder gives orders. A spiritual gift gives information.

That distinction has guided my work with hundreds of students. It is simple, practical, and it works. No PhD required.

Why This Matters for You

If you are reading this article, you are probably not a Yale psychiatrist. You are probably not a transpersonal psychologist with a PhD. You are probably someone who has a spiritual gift — or suspects they do — and is trying to figure out whether what they experience is real, manageable, and something they can live with.

Here is what the convergence of Yale, Dr. Bragdon, and my own work tells you:

1. You are not crazy

If the most prestigious university in the world has decided that spiritual experience belongs in the mental health conversation, then your experiences deserve to be taken seriously. You are not imagining things. You are perceiving things that 90% of psychiatrists have never been trained to recognise.

2. The system is catching up — but it is not there yet

Yale is at the conversation stage. They are figuring out a shared language. Dr. Bragdon is further ahead — she has a whole training programme for professionals. But neither of them is available to you at 3am when you wake up with visions you cannot explain and a knot in your stomach. That is where practitioners like me come in. The bridge does not just need to be built at the top. It needs to reach all the way down to you.

3. Brazil figured this out 120 years ago

This is the part I cannot get over. Spiritist psychiatric hospitals in Brazil have been integrating mediumship and mental health care since the 1900s. Government-funded. Evidence-based outcomes. Over 13,000 community centres offering free spiritual care alongside clinical treatment.

We are not inventing something new. We are rediscovering something old that the Western world suppressed for generations because it did not fit into the dominant scientific paradigm. The knowledge was always there. We just refused to look at it.

4. You do not have to wait for the institutions

Yale's program is wonderful. It will produce research, train students, and shift the conversation at the highest levels. But institutional change moves slowly — it will be years, possibly decades, before the average psychiatrist in the average clinic asks their patients about spiritual experience as a matter of routine.

You do not have to wait for that. Resources exist right now — Dr. Bragdon's courses, my blog, my masterclass, my coaching — for people who need help today, not in ten years when the academic consensus finally catches up.

A Personal Note — With a Smile

I want to end on a lighter note, because if I have learned anything in 20 years of being a clairvoyant in a world that mostly thinks I am strange, it is this: you have to be able to laugh about it.

When I was growing up, my parents worked at a psychiatric hospital. I was clairvoyant. They thought I had a mental disorder. Nobody had ever told them that the child sitting at their kitchen table, describing things she could not possibly know, was not broken — she was gifted.

It took me years to understand this. It took me more years to accept it. And it took me 20 years of teaching to build the bridge that Yale is now — bless them — very carefully, very politely, very academically beginning to talk about building.

So here is my message to Yale, to Harvard, to Dr. Bragdon, and to every institution that is finally turning its attention to the intersection of spirituality and mental health:

Welcome. Sincerely. We have been waiting for you. The seat is warm. The coffee is ready. And the gifted people you are now beginning to study? We have been helping them this whole time.

And to you — the person reading this article who has always known they were different, who has spent years wondering whether they are gifted or broken, who has been looking for someone to tell them the truth:

You were right. Something is right with you. It always was. And the world is finally starting to agree.

If you would like to explore your gift further — without waiting for an academic programme to give you permission — browse the other articles on this blog, or visit kimlessage.com to discover my free masterclass and courses.