Can a psychosis be the result of a mystical experience?
Appearance
This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.
Subject classification: this is a philosophy resource. |
Subject classification: this is a psychology resource. |
Someone with psychosis sometimes sees or hears things that are not there and has certain ideas that are not correct. It would be someone who has lost their grip on reality. But is that really the case? Does someone with psychosis not see reality, or do they actually see it while others do not? Can the cause of psychosis be a mystical experience?
Psychosis could actually be a mystical experience
[edit | edit source]Pro
[edit | edit source]- Pro People susceptible to mystical psychosis feel a unification with society, with the world, God, and also feel washing out the perceptive and conceptual borders. There must be something behind it.
- Objection A person experiencing mystical psychosis can only hypothesize that the source of their feelings is something mystical, but they would have to either identify the mystical origin of their feeling in an objective way or rule out any biological/psychological non-mystical explanations.
- Pro A spiritual experience can, due to human ignorance—because people lack knowledge of the metaphysical world—turn into a mental crisis. They no longer understand the world for a while, as they have, so to speak, a small door open to a hidden world that they cannot comprehend.
Con
[edit | edit source]- Con Psychosocial factors play a role in the development of psychosis. Stress can, for example, trigger a psychosis. Cannabis use can also trigger a psychosis.[1]
See also
[edit | edit source]Notes and references
[edit | edit source]- ↑ "Wat is een psychose?". Boom Psychologie & Psychiatrie (in Dutch). February 27, 2023.