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There have been times in my practice where, in my terms, things got a bit, well, "hairy". The one question that I asked myself is, "Am I drowning in this?" The answer has so far been no.
It's a hard issue. My late partner, (she died of cancer), had mental illness issues, and I could see that there was a distinct difference between those issues and what was sometimes going on with me. She would occasionally go off her meds, and all hell would break loose, and I don't mean in a spiritual sense.
Still, it is true that the psychiatric community can have a bias against experiences that occur in magick. All you have to do is look at schizotypal personality disorder, which defines as pathological communication with spirits if that is not the cultural norm.
A list of symptoms is as follows:
M - magical thinking that influences behavior, superstitiousness or the paranormal
E - eccentric behavior or appearance
P - paranoid ideation
E - experiences unusual perceptions
C - constricted affect
U - unusual thinking & speech
L - lacks friends
I - ideas of reference
A - anxiety (socially)
R - rule out psychotic disorders & pervasive developmental disorder.
BTW, I just love the mnemonic for the symptoms.MEPECULIAR!
How many magicians might fit this diagnosis?
Actually, me. I got the diagnosis when I was Wiccan, and made the mistake of talking to a therapist about my experiences in practice, and my beliefs. When I looked it up in DSM-III, (the manual of the time), I promptly went to him, read him off for pathologizing my religion, had him OFFICIALLY pull the diagnosis, and fired him. After that I was A LOT more careful.
A good friend of mine is a psychiatrist, and he and I had a chat about it. He told me that the rule of thumb that he applied was, "Is it pathological, i.e., is it harming the patient, or destroying their life." I told him about my spirit communications, he asked me what they told me. I responded, "Usually, I get good advice." "How do you feel about them?", he asked. "Pretty good.", I replied. "Anything bad ever shown up?" "Actually, yes." "What do you do?" "I banish it." "Does it stay away?" "Yes."
He told me that he felt that what I was experiencing was not pathological, and that non-pathology was the difference between what was occuring with me, and what was occuring with his patients.
I agree with Talks to Strangers on this. It can be a sticky wicket, as people who have serious illness can go off their meds, and very bad things can happen. Not only that, but I think all of us probably have seen a practitioner go over the edge. It's scary to me, because it's a reminder of just how close to that edge I sometimes ride. Still, you do have a point about the psychiatric community, in that it does tend to dismiss spiritual matters, and in my view, it is doing it more so every day, as consciousness get's increasingly defined as mere chemical process. |
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