Whether someone is crazy or not can be officially determined by a manual widely used to diagnose mental illness. This psychiatrists’ “Bible” has been the subject of much debate over the years, and long before it was written philosophers pondered the how to differentiate truth from delusion.
If psychologists were to all take the extreme materialist perspective and label any belief in a spiritual side of existence as delusion, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists alike could all be considered mentally ill. Few would argue that all people with spiritual beliefs are seriously mentally ill. But what about a believer who says he has directly perceived this spiritual realm? What about someone who says she has spoken to celestial beings?
A psychologist who believes in the spiritual may be less likely to diagnose such people as mentally ill. A strict materialist, however, may say these experiences are hallucinations and signs of severe mental illness.
The manual used to diagnose mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (referred to as the DSM) includes the category “Religious or Spiritual Problem.” The description in the 2013 DSM-V reads: “Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized church or religious institution.”
A ‘Watered Down’ Category
The inclusion of this category in 1994 was the result of efforts by Dr. Robert Turner and Dr. Francis Liu at the University of California–San Francisco. Their success was, however, incomplete. They wanted to see a broader category called “spiritual emergence” in the DSM.
Spiritual emergence was defined by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife, Christina, in their 1990 book “The Stormy Search for the Self”: “In the most general terms, spiritual emergence can be defined as the movement of an individual to a more expanded way of being that involves enhanced emotional and psychosomatic health, greater freedom of personal choices and a sense of deeper connection with other people, nature and the cosmos. An important part of this development is an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimension in one’s life and in the universal scheme of things ... When spiritual emergence is very rapid and dramatic, however, this natural process can become a crisis and spiritual emergence becomes spiritual emergency.”
Spiritual emergencies include near-death experiences, psychic openings, past-life memories, possession or spirit channeling, and more. Spiritual emergencies are spiritual emergence experiences that have become crises. It is in the cases of emergency that people are most likely to be branded mentally ill.
