Awakening experiences interpreted as symptoms of mental illness
About one in fifteen accounts include contact with psychiatric systems — hospitalization, diagnosis, medication — in response to awakening experiences. The experiences were interpreted as symptoms of mental illness rather than spiritual emergence.
These accounts raise important questions about the medical system's capacity to distinguish spiritual emergency from psychosis — a distinction that has real consequences for the people who move through these systems.
Like I said, I went to a psychiatrist, I was put on every psychiatric medication, I was just made a nurse and therapist, because I was really, I mean, very very depressed and anxious, and just trying to survive, to be honest, with my regular stuff.
If there's nothing else going on, if you can do a differential diagnosis so there's no bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, there's no blood chemistry kind of thing going on with somebody, then the best treatment is just keep them safe and don't medicate them.
It appears that mental illness is spiritual in nature — because look at this overlap from spiritual emergency into bipolar disorder into schizophrenia — the symptoms are completely fluid.
I couldn't leave the hospital unless I took their medication.
Experience types that appear most often alongside this.
Other integration challenges that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.