Razael wrote:I've tried to get diagnosed religious and spiritual problems but they just claimed on my report that I was ongoingly deluded spiritually by even talking about it, what a sham they aren't qualified to judge peoples spiritual problems.....if it wasn't the sleep deprivation then it was a transcendent or existential crisis going deep within myself and stirring traumatic stimuli but it was about spiritual growth and emergence of true spirit and relationship with myslef.
All from that link I just posted:
"Instances of such confusion are not uncommon among people who become
dazzled by contact with truths too great or energies too powerful for their mental
capacities to grasp and their personality to assimilate"
"According to the modern view, illness
disrupts and endangers life, whereas the shaman experiences his sickness as a call
to restructure this life within himself so as to hear, see and live it more fully and
completely in a higher state of awareness"
"Based on Perry's research and other accounts of patients with positive outcomes, the
following eight themes were identified as occurring commonly in spiritual emergencies
1. Death: being dead, meeting the dead or meeting Death
2. Rebirth: new identity, new name, resurrection, apotheosis to god, king or
messiah
3. Journey: Sense of being on a journey or mission
4. Encounters with Spirits: demonic forces and/or helping spirits
5. Cosmic conflict: good/evil, communists/Americans, light/dark, male/female
6. Magical powers: telepathy, clairvoyance, ability to read minds, move objects
7. New society: radical change in society, religion, New Age, utopia, world peac
8. Divine union: God as father, mother, child; Marriage to God, Christ, Virgin
Mary, Radha or Krishna"
"The most important task is to give people in crisis a positive context for their
experiences and sufficient information about the process that they are going
through. It is essential that they move away from the concept of disease and
recognize the leading nature of their crisis..."
You could have course have asked the psychiatrist what their spiritual background qualifications were, but i suppose they'd have seen that as passive aggressive lol, and a threat to their sense of authority. Yes the sad thing is is that despite occasional mention of cultural or spiritual background, or spiritual and religious problems as a diagnosis, psychiatrists are given absolutely no education on any of these phenomena, and they could all do with a darn good read through that link I just posted, which covers a lot of the ground, from a clinical perspective.
I think a lot of what is passed as mental illness takes a specifically spiritual nature, connects to the growth of their personality, morality, universal spiritual concepts, other worlds, other entities and so forth. If you look at the definitions for example of the symptoms of new age awakening, and the symptoms of kundalini syndrom, you'll find its very hard to differentiate this from mental illness generally.
Of course, that link has some tips for differential diagnosis, but again, the materialist outlook of the psychiatrists themselves, and the writers of the dsm, preclude and are more or less antagonistic to spiritual ideas.
I think, in general, the religious and spiritual world should be more concerned about this than they are.
Personally I know that my own difficult experience were (past tense) some kind of awakening. They prompted me to become aware of realities I was unaware of, and to change in myself as well. I am a new person due to them. Yes, they were, totally overwhelming at first, and disorienting and brought out everything that was wrong with me. But thats the nature of receiving a large novel stream of information, like waking up on a new planet, or with new set of physics, it takes time to adapt and adjust - and its also the nature of abrupt personal change or "crisis". This is all well established in various spiritual traditions, from shamanism, to new age, to hinduism however much psychiatry would like to deny all spirituality and religion and enforce a materialist view of reality and conciousness.
"Some patients have a mental illness and then get well and then they get weller! I mean they get better than they ever were .... This is an extraordinary and little-realized truth" - Karl Menninger MD