Awakening experiences interpreted as symptoms of mental illness
About one in fifteen accounts include contact with psychiatric systems: hospitalization, diagnosis, or 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.
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.
So a number of times, three, four times, I got hospitalized, medicated, diagnosed, and the psychiatrists were guaranteeing that I had this chemical imbalance that was just discovered.
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.
I think there's probably a lot of people in psychiatric hospitals.