Introduction to Exploring Unusual Experiences

Welcome

The term unusual experiences may bring to mind a number of things, at its most basic it is an experience that falls outside of typical day to day life. It isn’t presently a fully defined concept and it isn’t within popular vocabulary. For the purposes of this course it encompasses things that are out of the ordinary when it comes to perception, beliefs and states of consciousness, from fairly common perceptual variations like dissociation to the more unusual experiences like hearing a voice or having a vision.

The Exploring Unusual Experiences topic of this course covers a wide range of unusual experiences but is not exhaustive, if none of them resonate with you, there are other avenues for learning about your experience.

Having unusual experiences is something that can happen to anyone but it seems to happen more frequently and intensely for a small percentage of the population; this has been seen in many cultures around the world and goes far back in human history. The way these experiences are explained, defined and treated varies but the existence of them is widely accepted and has been for a long time.

The most important thing is that a person can make sense of, and integrate their unusual experiences.

The Exploring Unusual Experiences topic

This topic starts by looking at some examples of types of unusual experiences that people can have acknowledging the profound nature of them and the impact they can have. It then considers how these may, in some cases, reach the threshold to be understood within the scope of psychiatry as a diagnosable disorder. It finishes with looking at how unusual experiences can have positive or beneficial aspects.

This topic can be controversial; unusual experiences within the mental health field are typically associated with mental health diagnoses related to psychosis. For that reason, this course does go on to follow the ICD-11 as a framework to explore various aspects of unusual experiences. The associated medical terms are given in brackets. However, within this course, these are conceptualised differently to acknowledge that these experiences are on a spectrum of human experience, so the term unusual experience is preferred and symptoms are seen as an alteration of typical perceptual experience and ways of being. As such, they are grouped as altered sensing or thinking (positive), altered abilities (negative and cognitive), altered mood (depressive and manic) and altered motion (psychomotor).

It is worth noting that people are not likely to have all of the unusual experiences mentioned in this course, instead individuals will relate to some parts but not others. These experiences are unique to each individual although there are some shared and similar experiences between people.

This topic is designed to explore and describes some of the different types of unusual experiences but doesn’t seek to explain them. For more information about why these experiences happen, from a variety of perspectives, please see the Explaining Unusual Experiences topic of this course.

Aims

We hope by the end of this course you will have:

• Considered a broad range of unusual experiences.
• Knowledge of the altered abilities associated with unusual experiences and how these are classified within a diagnostic framework (ICD-11).
• Considered some of the potential benefits of unusual experiences.
• Explored ways of living with unusual experiences.
• Recognised that unusual experiences are on a continuum and most people will have experienced them to some degree.