Marcel Westerlund’s patient was declared a lost cause after he slashed his throat.

Hypnotherapy revealed he’d only done so because he was wracked with guilt; he’d been a mercenary in a previous life.

“He had been responsible for killing men, women and children,” said Dr Westerlund, the forensic psychiatrist for Bermuda’s prisons. “His soul was so overcome with guilt that he was now trying to kill himself. Once he dealt with that guilt, he got better.”

The 57-year-old initially tried hypnosis as a lark, but was shocked to vividly remember being a priest in ancient Egypt.

“I was a priest at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor,” he said.

“My mistake was to heal the queen. You know in those days you weren’t even supposed to touch the queen, and she turned up pregnant. They blamed me and I was executed.”

The experience moved him to incorporate hypnosis into his practice. He says the success he’s had with prisoners here is in keeping with his work with people in his native Sweden and England. For the past 14 years he’s kept a record of the impact hypnotherapy has had on patients with depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. Dr Westerlund will give a talk tomorrow at the BUEI based on his book, Afterlife, which details his hypnosis experiences.

His first hypnosis patient was a woman suffering from severe anxiety.

“Until then, I had dismissed my own experience with hypnotherapy,” he said, “but she wanted to be treated without drugs. I suggested she try someone else, but she said, ‘I want you’. She had already been to six other doctors.”

The patient remembered numerous past lives under hypnosis, but one lived in Italy seemed to be the source of her current trouble. In that life, she’d been unfairly accused of being unfaithful to her husband and left to starve in a walled-up cave.

“Once she dealt with that experience in the hypnotherapy sessions, she was able to move on in her present life and heal.

“Hypnosis can be helpful because it can put into context where you are and where you are going,” said Dr Westerlund.

He trained with Michael Newton, an expert in England, but said he sometimes encountered scepticism from his colleagues.

“Sometimes they claim to be critical of it, and then they bring their wife to me for treatment,” he said. “People say one thing and do another. My main mission has always been to treat and help people to recover.”

Dr Westerlund says he’s been fascinated by difficult cases throughout his career.

“I ask for the difficult ones,” he said. “Maybe I am nuts.”

The patient who had been written off as incurable because he cut his throat was able to stop taking a number of strong medications with help from hypnotherapy, Dr Westerlund said.

“I called him a year later, and he was fine. He was married and had a baby and was living a settled life.”

Dr Westerlund said he doesn’t always use hypnotherapy to take his patients back to previous lives.

“Sometimes we just go back to an earlier period in their current life,” he said. “Under deep hypnosis we can remember just about everything. Many of my patients remember being in the womb.

“If we have consciousness before birth why couldn’t there be consciousness after death?”

Sometimes he just uses hypnosis to make positive suggestions to a patient, such as ‘go home and eat right’.

He estimated that hypnotherapy had been successful with about 60 per cent of his patients.

“Some patients don’t respond to it because they are too rigid or sceptical or they can’t relax,” he said.

But he cautioned that hypnotherapy was not for people with drug addictions or personality disorders.

He decided to write Afterlife to promote hypnotherapy as a treatment. “It is becoming an accepted treatment option around the world,” he said.

Afterlife is available as an audio book on iTunes, on Amazon and on Kindle. It’s also on sale at BUEI, part proceeds will be given to the local institution.

His talk at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute takes place at 7.30pm. Admission is $20 for members and $25 for non-members. Tickets are available by calling 294-0204 or by visiting the BUEI gift shop. Look for Dr Westerlund on Facebook.