Spirituality and religious experiences
Spirituality gives another view from which you can explore and understand unusual life experiences in your mental health recovery.
Many people who have had unusual life experiences may receive a mental health diagnosis to explain and label their experiences. How people understand unusual life experiences is very personal and there are many ways to do this.
Everyone has a different experience
How one person makes sense of their life varies a lot to how another might. Sometimes it is useful to find out if how a person understands is helpful or not. For example, you might find a diagnosis helpful in understanding your experiences, whereas others feel that it makes no sense to them. Others will be somewhere in between, finding a diagnosis useful , but also finding that it doesn’t explain everything they experience well enough.
Some people split unusual experiences into ‘psychotic’ and ‘mystical’. But there is no clear line between the two and unusual experiences can be described very differently.
Joseph Campbell (26 March 1904 to 30 October 1987) was an American mythologist, writer, and lecturer in mythology and religion. His work covers many areas of the human experience. He describes the connection between psychotic and mystical experiences, ‘The psychotic (person) is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight’.
Charles Heriott-Maitland describes unusual experiences in the following way, ‘Mystical and psychotic experiences are both ‘altered states of consciousness” occupying the space where reason breaks down and mystery takes over’.
Unusual experiences could improve your life but for someone else they can be harmful. Answering the question why is difficult. It is about how you understand, find meaning and respond to your experiences that seems to make a difference. Charles Heriott-Maitland is involved in a new project called Compassion for Voices.
Video
He made a five-minute film with Kate Anderson about it below: