Humans are inherently spiritual beings, seeking to make sense of themselves, their perceptions and experiences, and their place in the natural, physical, and social world in which they live. Spirituality, spiritual practice, and perhaps religion as well, predate many if not most other human endeavors. However, as the human world has grown more secular, and with increasing focus on reason, intellect, and individual autonomy, many spiritual and religious experiences, especially in the Western world, are often dismissed as anomalous delusion, branded as “psychosis,” and treated as psychiatric conditions. In this plenary session, five individuals will speak about the ways in which their lives were disrupted by their experiences of hearing voices, seeing visions, and other unusual or extraordinary states of being, along with sometimes extended periods of time spent within the mental health system. They will then speak to the ways in which spiritual perception, experience, and understanding guided them in discovering or rediscovering themselves, allowing them to make peace with the ways in which they experience and perceive the world, and over time learning to live more fully within it. The panel will be facilitated by a psychiatrist who has had his own experiences with spiritual emergency and spiritual breakthrough.

This is a panel presentation in dialogue with the Researcher- Denise Maratos, and two of the Participants – Claire Bien and Oryx Cohen. The research questions and themes will be discussed by the panel.

Qualitative interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to explore the phenomena of extraordinary experiences, otherwise known as transpersonal, numinous, transcendent, alternate states of consciousness, mystical or spiritual experiences, peak experiences, extreme states, etc., and their emergence within the mental health system, often labeled as “psychosis” and/or other psychiatric diagnoses. The impact of pathologizing such experiences and possible misdiagnoses were examined by conducting semi-structured interviews with eight participants who experienced extraordinary experiences and were labeled with psychiatric diagnoses. These personal interviews explored each individual experience and the themes that emerged. The research questions engaged the participants with their own personal experiences as phenomena that are not easily understood by many current mental health professionals, family members, and society. While working within a societal context where these experiences are often pathologized in the Western biomedical model at the conscious level, the researcher explored the effects these experiences had on the individuals and how they each perceived themselves within their families, communities, and society. The findings bring awareness and knowledge to clinical psychology by exposing extraordinary experiences as experiences not fully understood by the mental healthcare industry. As the results indicate, it is necessary to comprehend the nature of such individualized extraordinary experiences by carefully listening to unique personal stories in order to understand emotional distress, to clarify the meaning of psychiatric diagnoses, and to provide the appropriate healing in the therapeutic process.

A wide range of social disparities and traumatic experiences have been found to exert adverse influence over mental well-being. Extreme states of consciousness or madness are bound up with other aspects of identity and madness cannot be considered as the only salient aspect of an individual’s experience or position. To be fully explored, madness cannot be examined in isolation. Intersectionality considers the relevance of multiple identities and the ways in which identities are defined and experienced through one another or how they are mutually constitutive. No one person who has experienced madness can represent mad people as a whole as there are significant variations in the ways we are privileged and disadvantaged. Accordingly, there are multiple perspectives outside the dominant medical model of madness. Those with lived experience of mental or emotional distress can offer alternative constructions to the mainstream narrative of “mental illness.” Communicating Mad knowledge through stories or testimonies has been foundational to the Mad communities as a means of asserting that such perspectives are representative of real knowledge. Such testimonies can contribute to the social imagination and social change. We must begin to regard everyone’s self-narrative as central and assert that there can be no knowledge about us without us. The Experts by Experience plenary focuses on how the presenters’ experiences and identities impacted both their mental distress and their recovery journeys. The presenters discuss how oppression and privilege impacted both disability and healing and why certain recovery approaches appealed to them.