Why grief mimics psychosis and unlocks deeper senses

After her husband Robin died, Swart experienced symptoms she’d previously associated with severe mental illness in patients—thought insertion, intense somatic pain, and altered perception. Using her psychiatric training, she repeatedly checked herself against clinical criteria for depression and psychosis while simultaneously exploring whether these experiences might reflect an expanded, rather than broken, consciousness. She argues that understanding grief as a neurochemical and perceptual upheaval—"grief is like psychosis"—can normalize extreme experiences and increase compassion for the bereaved.

Swart cites literature suggesting humans have around 34 distinct senses, including non-conscious ones like sensing blood pH, CO₂/O₂ balance, and internal temperature, plus more subtle perceptual capacities. She uses this to argue that our picture of human perception is incomplete and that our brains filter a much richer mind, allowing the possibility of perceiving things (including "signs") that we don’t currently recognize as senses.

She describes delayed waves of intense body pain and freezing sensations around anniversaries and key dates tied to her husband’s illness, which she later linked to stored trauma. Because trauma can shut down brain regions responsible for speech, some experiences become "speechless" and can’t be processed verbally. Swart recommends body-based modalities—massage, dance, yoga, tai chi, craniosacral therapy, drumming, chanting—as crucial complements to talk therapy to discharge trauma held in muscles, fascia, and the nervous system.

Borrowing from concepts like the reticular activating system, novelty salience, and low latent inhibition, Swart suggests we can consciously loosen the brain’s filters to notice more of what we usually ignore. She deliberately asks for highly specific, unlikely signs (e.g., “a phoenix,” a figure-eight elastic band, specific words by a set time) and tracks astonishing coincidences, arguing that even if some of it is confirmation bias, it can be harnessed constructively for meaning, guidance, and creativity.

Swart highlights cases of terminal lucidity—severely demented or non-verbal patients becoming fully coherent hours before death—and medically documented NDEs, especially accounts from physicians like Dr. Mary Neal and Dr. Eben Alexander, and psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Greyson’s ‘red MG’ case. She argues these data are hard to reconcile with the idea that mind emerges only from damaged brains, and cites researchers (Eagleman, Hoffman, Bathiany) who entertain models where consciousness is primary or brain as "receiver," while noting these hypotheses are unproven but not disprovable with current science.