Spiritual Emergency, Psychedelics and Mental Illness

How the medical-pharmaceutical complex destroys spiritual healing

In compliance with my “deterministic, no free will stance”, today’s story was triggered by this somewhat misguided but sad and tragic Substack story:

The cost of utopia

It tells the story of an average, ordinary family man, pilot Joseph Emerson, who suffered from the recent death of a friend and went on to fly to Washington to try magic mushrooms for the first time and has a bad reaction. Struggling with it and not sleeping for 40 hours, he then boards an aeroplane back home:

As an off-duty pilot for Alaska [Airlines], he got to travel in the jump-seat of the cockpit for free. During the flight, he said ‘I’m not OK’, then grabbed the emergency shut off handles, which would have turned off the plane’s engines. The pilots wrestled him out of the cockpit.

The plane made an emergency landing in Portland, and Emerson was arrested. He’s since been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder. If convicted he could face at least ten years in jail.

When questioned by police about the why, he replied:

I pulled both emergency shut off handles because I thought I was dreaming and I just wanna wake up

This is an example of a spiritual emergency. Sadly, mainstream media and the general public, totally dominated by the medical-pharmaceutical complex’s narrative on mental health, don’t call it that. They never did.

Until the mid-seventies, they did not even distinguish between spiritual or mystical experiences and mental illness. Moses, Jesus, the Buddha and countless other mystics would have been all diagnosed with being “mentally ill” by psychiatrists. (So much about the inflated ego of scientists)

An of-the-mill, average middle-aged psychiatrist sees a modern-age future mystic who just went through the mind-blowing experience of a spiritual awakening and needs some help to adjust to this new reality. The psychiatrist takes out his DSM-5 handbook, diagnoses him with “derealization syndrome”, and puts him into a potent pharmaceutical straight-jacket for probably the rest of his life. Bye-bye Mr. Mystic.

Ronald D. Liang, one of the few psychiatrists with a functioning reflective brain, famously once said: “The Schizophrenic and Mystic are in the same ocean. But the Schizophrenic drowns while the Mystic swims in it.” Well, try to swim in a chemical straight-jacket. Granted, the straight-jacket, which doubles up as a life vest, keeps him afloat (barely), but he won’t swim anywhere meaningful.

In contrast, a spiritual emergency is a short-term acute situation, and the goal is to support someone through it and turn it into an “integrated spiritual awakening experience” that not only heals the initial mental and emotional trauma but lifts people to a higher plane of consciousness, love and wisdom. A spiritual and mental crisis has almost always been part of a spiritual awakening.

“The dark night of the soul” is another descriptive term for such a crisis and is well-known in several religions.

These spiritual emergencies are and always have been quite common. They can happen spontaneously, through prayers and spiritual practises, near-death experiences or other trauma, and can also be triggered, intentionally or accidentally, by psychedelics. “The Good Friday Experiment” is probably the most cited psychedelically induced spirituality research project.

The author of the above Substack story, Jules Evans, thinks Joseph probably suffered from a “derealization” episode. He listed the below list, which are examples of “spiritual emergencies”, classified as and labelled as “mental illness”.

“Derealization” was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Code in 2013. “Depersonalization” is another one. Questioning and transcending this reality or the sense of personhood is at the core of many spiritual practices. Some meditators or self-enquiry practitioners would love to get some of it.

However, if it happens uninvited and spontaneously, it is no laughing matter. The unprepared, everyday egoic personality can get extremely confused, scared and emotionally upset. Spiritual healers, who know all about this from personal experience, can provide help but have been vastly eliminated and character-assassinated in our culture by the mental health industry.

The pharmaceutical-medical complex has turned all spiritual emergency events into mental diseases and has no clue or intention to heal them properly. Not much money can be made by quickly healing people.