Spirituality/Medicine Interface Project

Visionary Spiritual Experiences

Authors: David Lukoff, PhD

Abstract

Even though psychotic disorders can have debilitating effects, many clinicians and researchers have observed that some psychotic episodes result in improvements in an individual's functioning. Karl Menninger, often recognized as a founder of American psychiatry, noted: “Some patients have a mental illness and then get well and then they get weller! I mean they get better than they ever were. This is an extraordinary and little-realized truth.”1 Boisen,2 who was hospitalized for a psychotic episode and then became a minister who founded the field of pastoral counseling, maintained: “Many of the more serious psychoses are essentially problem solving experiences which are closely related to certain types of religious experiences.”3 Perry4pointed out that below the surface level of specific identities and beliefs are thematic similarities in the accounts of patients whose psychotic episodes have good outcomes: “There appears to be one kind of episode which can be characterized by its content, by its imagery, enough to merit its recognition as a syndrome. In it there is a clustering of symbolic contents into a number of major themes strangely alike from one case to another.”

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