Most discussions that I’ve seen about mental health and religion typically focus on the most common mental illnesses – depression and anxiety – and acknowledge that these mental health issues block feelings of the spirit. Today, let’s talk about the mental health issues that make the spirit (or something like it) more accessible.
I was a spiritual giant. From my youth, I had well-defined and unmistakable spiritual experiences. I was a bit puzzled by a friend who said she’d never felt the spirit (we were 16) because I felt the spirit all the time. I was also puzzled by people who couldn’t tell the difference between their feelings and the spirit. I didn’t have many feelings (remember that for later), but I sure knew what the spirit felt like! It was a strong sense of profound ideas, accompanied by a compulsion to act on it and the confidence to do things that are a bit out of the norm. It definitely came from outside myself. I also scratched my head about people who said they couldn’t get answers to their prayers, or recognize them. I talked to God and he talked back. Not verbally, of course. But I’d had an active connection to God ever since I was a teen.
I was on the teacher track at Church. At every single ward I’ve ever been in (and I moved around constantly, so that’s a lot of wards), I was a teacher. Not only that, I was frequently the best teacher in the ward, and many people told me I was the best teacher they’ve ever heard. Well duh. I had the spiritual gift of teaching (D&C 46:17-18) and my patriarchal blessing said so. I’m a charismatic speaker. Once, after I spoke at a fireside (I was the five minute “spiritual thought” intro speaker before the main speaker (a man) spoke), I literally got rushed by people wanting my notes. I’d brought several copies because I’d gotten used to people asking me for my talk and lesson notes. This time was unusual because I also got asked for my autograph. At a Church fireside. The main speaker quietly left while I was signing autographs and listening to people gush. I’m not bragging (much) – just giving you a picture of how insightful, compelling and charismatic I could be.
That charisma was a switch I could flip. When I was “on” I was amazing. I typically flipped the switch and turned “on” at Church and school (where I also excelled). First impressions are everything, right? Wow, my first impressions were amazing. It was all very righteous, of course. This was the Spirit that I was channeling, the Holy Ghost, the witness of truth and the Third Member of the Godhead. I burned bright until I flamed out because I couldn’t sustain that first impression. It’s a good thing I moved so often. Why stick around and disappoint people?
Because of my strong connection to Heavenly Father, I was also the target of Satan’s attacks. My mission president explained that connection. At a Zone Conference, he told a story about an experience he’d had with Satan and casting him out. He testified that if we were doing the Lord’s work, we had to be ready for Satan’s attacks. So that’s what I was dealing with! I already identified strongly with Nephi, who saw “many afflictions in the course” of his days, but also “had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God” (1 Nephi 1:1). The way he went from having visions to being cast down in despair was pretty familiar to me. I’d crash after a particularly strong spiritual experience.
Joseph Smith was pretty relatable too. He was nearly destroyed by Satan before he saw God and Christ in the first vision (JSH 1:15-16). Then later, he felt like he wasn’t living up to his potential and got depressed, so he prayed to ask God if about his standing (JSH 1:29), and God sent Moroni to keep him up all night having visions (JSH 1:47). I never had anything anywhere near that intense, but the pattern was familiar to me – spiritual experiences came packaged with some really rough experiences.
On my mission, I found out that not everyone is suicidal. My companion said something after we’d talked to someone who was suicidal. It blew my mind, but I kept my surprise off my face (not showing emotions was a survival skill in my family) and didn’t say anything. But I turned it over in my mind later — some people think suicide is unthinkable. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to die. Was that not typical?
No matter. I had some epic spiritual experiences on my mission which outweighed that odd idea. One experience was about the equality of men and women — it was the first time in my life (but certainly not the last) in which I felt “pure intelligence” flowing into me. That’s how Joseph Smith describes the revelatory process and I knew what it was when I felt it.
Fast forward about ten years — my life had somehow gotten off track. I was still excelling at Church talks and lessons, and my stellar grades led to a stellar degree and job, but I wasn’t married and having children like I was supposed to. In fact, I’d never even dated the same guy more than twice. Even more head scratching, I hadn’t made a single new friend in ten years. I was impressive, no question about that, but you don’t make friends because you’re impressive. You make friends because you connect with them. I didn’t connect.
Slowly, I was beginning to realize that some aspects of my personality were difficult for other people to deal with. Wimps. Nothing could be harder for them than it was for me to deal with my personality. Sometimes I got really sad about the fact that I hadn’t died yet. Wasn’t I good enough to die? Why wouldn’t God take me home to the Celestial Kingdom already? Being alive another day came with a sense of failure. It was just so hard to be alive. Except for when it was totally epic and I had to live long enough to carry out God’s plan for my life.
All right, let’s skip a bunch of stuff and a lot of years and get to my psychological evaluation.
After quitting Church, I noticed that my ups and downs were the same as when I was a faithful Mormon. I’d always thought prayer and righteousness helped keep me from sinking into permanent despair, but it turned out that other non-religious activities were just as good at pulling me out of despair. It’s like … it’s like I wasn’t having spiritual experiences paired with attacks from Satan. It’s like those were just emotional patterns?? What??
Another important development in the years that I’m skipping is that I discovered my emotions again. It turned out that I do have emotions. For the first couple decades of my life, my dominating emotion was the abject terror of my father. Once I processed that, it set my other emotions free and I was gradually learning to understand my feelings and find out what my personality was like when I wasn’t at Level Ten Fear all the time.
So. The pandemic happened and I was fine until I wasn’t. I went to the doctor to ask for a Xanax prescription. I just needed a bit of help once in a while, that’s all. This wasn’t serious, just a touch of anxiety that got a bit worse during the pandemic. I filled out the psych questionnaires, lying to answer all the questions that ask about being suicidal. I always lied in answer to those questions. I didn’t want to be hospitalized. I knew enough to call the Suicide Prevention Hotline when I needed to. Duh. Everyone knows that. Being suicidal was just my baseline emotion, not something to tell a doctor.
The doctor said I had bipolar disorder and I said I wanted a second opinion. Full disclosure: the conversation wasn’t quite that calm, but that’s the essence of it.
The second opinion went like this.
I got a referral to a Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology, nicknamed a Psy.D (pronounced sigh-dee). That’s a very specific degree that makes you an expert in diagnosing mental health conditions. My Psy.D took private clients, but about half his clientele was evaluating prisoners in jail and other people referred to him by a judge. (In the US of A, the way to get mental health treatment if you’re poor and don’t have health insurance is to get arrested.)
I did a one-hour intake interview. To prepare for this, I wrote up a 20-page single spaced summary of every mental health crisis point in my life. Other people don’t do that to prep for a diagnosis, but I’m an overachiever so that’s what I did.
After the intake, I came back for a three-hour appointment to take multiple choice tests and true false tests. The Psy.D picked out which tests, based on what he’d learned from the first interview and my mental health dissertation. I answered about 800+ questions on a tablet. I even answered the questions about being suicidal honestly. I finally wanted to know what was really going on.
Weeks later, I went back to get my diagnosis. The Psy.D gave me a 13-page single spaced report that basically climbed into my mind and read it from the inside. I was extremely rational in the appointment while he went over it with me. I thanked him politely and assured him that I was fine. We chatted and laughed. This behavior is called masking.
I crashed the next day after getting the kids off to school (I could control the timing but not the crash; I knew it was coming and I managed to keep my kids from witnessing it). That report freaked me out so badly that I couldn’t finish reading it. I didn’t want to be known on that level, not even by myself. I spiraled; I bought a bottle of wine and tried to get drunk [fn 1]; I took meds I shouldn’t have taken (nothing lethal); I called the Suicide Prevention Hotline and discovered they have a mental health crisis response team because they dispatched them to my home after a ten minute conversation.
By the next morning, I was perfectly fine again and teleworked a full day and then chatted cheerfully with the therapist from the mental health response team who called me to follow up on my epic meltdown from the day before. Haha! Such an overreaction! I’m just fine. Life’s great, isn’t it? Sorry to have wasted your time!
Mood swings are kinda my thing.
Anyway.
I do not have Bipolar Disorder. I also do not have Borderline Personality Disorder [fn 2]. I also don’t have Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder [fn 3]. Nor do I have Complex PTSD. What I have are tendencies and patterns that, if they were any worse, would put me over the edge and into a diagnosis in at least one of these categories. [fn 4]
My Psy.D diagnosed me with General Anxiety Disorder (fair) and Major Depressive Disorder. (That one confused the Psy.D. “You don’t present like you have depression,” he said. “Weird,” I agreed. I mean, if he didn’t notice that I’d answered every single question about suicide with “yes” then I wasn’t going to bring it up.)
We’ll skip the details of me coming to terms with my psychological evaluation (I can now read the entire thing without freaking out) and starting medication (I’m no longer suicidal) [fn 5] and working my way through Dialectical Behavior Therapy (instructions in how to accept that I am not receiving messages from God or Satan).
I haven’t had a spiritual experience since then. Thank God (thank science).
I’ve seen plenty of blog posts about how depression and anxiety can keep you from feeling the spirit. But what about if you’ve got a mental health issue that makes you TOO sensitive to the spirit? Because I wasn’t hallucinating (all) those spiritual experiences. I’ll share some of them in future posts. I’ve had experiences with spiritual promptings and “pure intelligence” that link into the real world and actual truth. Experiences that, even in hindsight with my psychological evaluation in hand, I cannot explain any other way than to conclude that I connected with some sort of Something Out There.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll post some more thoughts about the intersection of spiritual experiences and the mental health profession.
footnotes:
[fn 1] I drank about one-third of a bottle of cheap wine. I loathed the taste. It gave me an instant headache. I got a little bit dizzy, but it didn’t even take the edge off of my panic. I felt like crap. The next day, I poured the rest of it down the sink. I did not want to sin; I just couldn’t stand my feelings and desperately needed to do something to make my feelings go away. Alcohol didn’t work.
[fn 2] Borderline Personality Disorder is frequently confused with Bipolar Disorder.
[fn 3] Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder is different from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. They really should have picked a different name.
[fn 4] I want to be entirely clear that I do not actually have these disorders. I don’t want anyone who reads this post to develop unrealistic expectations for someone they might know who actually does have a diagnosable disorder. “Disorder” means you can’t maintain normal life functioning. If I actually had a disorder, I highly doubt that I would be able to hold down a full-time job, for example. Even just the sub-clinical tendencies that I have are enough to have blown up my life many times. I didn’t achieve the stability that I’m at now until I was in my late 40s.
[fn 5] I was first diagnosed with depression in my early 30s and I took anti-depressants for 18 months. I got self-destructive. I didn’t attempt to die by suicide, but I took some other really unwise risks. I quit meds after 18 months and was afraid to try them again because of what I did while I was taking them. If you’re suicidal, the apathy of depression is a protection. Meds gave me my energy levels back without changing my desires to just stop existing. I understand why some people get more self-destructive once they are being treated.
Questions:
- Did you ever meet somebody who lived on a whole different level of inspiredness than you? What did you think of them?
- Example: the people who insist that they get promptings about what to buy at the store. I got promptings about what to buy when I prayed for them (I was broke, okay? I needed help to stretch my money). I didn’t announce those experiences in fast and testimony meeting, but I had them.
- If any of the Church leaders said they had actually seen and talked to Jesus Christ, would this be a marvelous revelation? Or a psychotic episode? Would you really want to follow someone who genuinely believed he was talking to Jesus?
- Why did some people in the 1800s believe other people could talk to God and have visions or revelations? Because Joseph Smith wasn’t the only one. Several other churches were founded at about the same time Joseph Smith got the LDS Church started. And there were others who claimed profound spiritual experiences who didn’t go on to start a church.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call 988.
Wheat & Tares 
I freaked you all out, didn’t I?
Is this TMI? Because I have another post I could put up instead about how the Protestant work ethic sucks.
My mom and her sisters all have this. Very similar story; overbearing, abusive father, and overachieving, charismatic, intelligent daughters who can’t relate to people, can’t make friends, and believe that God talks to them.
In one case, this led to severe, long term delusions, homelessness, and death. Others are more successfully masking. None of them seem to be doing well, though. All have strained, or non-existent, relationships with their children and grandchildren and each other. They are also all devout TBMs.
My mom’s situation worsened as she aged. Because I’m the oldest, my experience with her was mostly good. My younger siblings had a harder time.
To her credit, she has taken some steps toward understanding what’s going on and fixing it, but not enough. I think she’s afraid a real doctor will point out that her relationship with God is largely based on delusions that she’ll have to abandon to get better. Maybe Someone already told her that. Recently she switched over to alternative medicine. (“If it worked, they’d just call it medicine”).
Glad you’re doing better, Janey.
This is not TMI. Very thought provoking. Thank you for writing it!
Long time reader, first time commenter. Janey, not tmi—thoughtful, detailed, introspective, transparent,and will probably affect people in a variety of ways. I am in an early stage of older adulthood and have often been complimented for my charismatic speaking. Once, after offering the concluding talk in sacrament meeting (that ward’s first time for a female), I had several people joke that I should start my own church and they would join immediately. I tried to make any assigned topic matter to me and others in real-world ways (and often veered widely off topic with a salient quote or two thrown in for good measure).
I have had numerous experiences that I consider spiritual or amazing; those have continued occasionally after not attending church meetings for a decade. I have no significant mental health issues but a couple of my adult children do, and I have learned a great deal from them and about them. This idea that you shared struck me: If you’re suicidal, the apathy of depression is a protection. I am processing that as it relates to loved ones.
Thank you for sharing your journey fearlessly and with candor. Glad you found help and healing.
AnonForThis – that’s heartbreaking. It’s so hard. It is SO HARD and I’m sorry for the suffering in your family. I wish I could sit down and have an honest conversation with my siblings and mom about our struggles, but those conversations are very unlikely. You said their relationships were all strained, but I’m going to ask anyway. Did your mom ever get to talk to her sisters about what life was like?
E – thank you!
a great dane – Sometimes I wonder about the connection between charisma and spirituality. I don’t know how to put it in words yet, but there’s something that breaks down the barriers between people and forms instant connections (charisma) and perhaps it is related to a more transparent barrier between us and whatever is On The Other Side. I’d be interested in your thoughts on my next several posts. And I’m glad the insight about apathy helped.
I knew we had a lot in common…. But good god!
Only difference is that I didn’t have any charisma, I think I don’t like people enough to want to charm them. Or maybe it is that my father was charismatic, and because he was also a living terror, I don’t want to be anything like him.
The bit about masking and coming across as perfectly fine. Yeah, I could fool the psyc professors. Except one did this personality test in class and we self graded (if we had not been self grading, I would have lied, but then his was one he developed and standardized and designed to prevent fibs) and I blurted out, out loud that I had miss calculated because the score was kind of off the chart. He calmly said see him after class and he would catch the mistake. Yeah, he didn’t look for a mistake. Just looked me in the eyes and ask if I was suicidal. Yeah, but suicidal, that is normal. I had grown up, gotten married, had three kids, and was almost finished with a double major top student in both departments, by then and I didn’t know any “not depressed” and suicidal.
He told me later that it shocked him that I seemed perfectly all right, that of everyone in the class, well, in the whole department, I was the last person he would have guessed.
So, yes, depression. I had lived in that condition, masking all symptoms for so long that it just seemed normal. It was all I knew.
And I still cannot explain some of my spiritual experiences as anything but “pure intelligence” being poured into my brain. Some “intelligence” outside of myself that can communicate with me and knows stuff, like the moment a baby is conceived, and loves us with this perfect love. No explanation of “stuff bubbling up from our sub conscious ” works for where this knowledge comes from. Even the other, the evil, I cannot explain it without using religious terms. And I have left religion as so much hokum, so, now how do I explain these experiences?
And, yeah, I am no longer having those spiritual experiences, now that I am not depressed. But I cannot say depression caused them
Great Dane, there is science behind that apathy, low energy of depression being a protection. In fact, there are evolutionary theories that say depression is genetically engineered to make the brain just malfunctioning enough and the person so tired feeling that our cave man ancestors didn’t have energy to leave the cave, because it is safer in the cave. Those who got depressed survived, but those who went out made stupid mistakes or found a cliff to jump from.
Depression immobilizes a person, so they can’t act on the feeling of wanting to die. Danger is when depression lifts enough that they can act on wanting to die.
Almost 50 years ago, I volunteered for a suicide protection hot line. Part of the training was about what the director (PhD in psychology) called an unscientific and unprofessional term for the time that I will just call the “pits” when the person wants to be dead. But depression is such that the brain is not really working, so formulating a plan and having the energy to carry it out is impossible. The very most dangerous time for suicide is when the medication kicks in and their brain starts working again but the emotions have not really caught up yet. Or, without the modern medicines, the person is doing better and the family relaxes some, and !BAM!, they run the car off a cliff. Everyone is so confused. “But they were doing SO much better.” Yes, just better enough that they could think through a suicide plan and do it.
So, for your loved ones, the very most dangerous time is the week after they finally get on anti depressants or see a mental health professional. When suddenly they have more energy, seem happier, and start living again, is when you don’t leave them alone.
Sometimes it is because they finally decided once and for all to end it. That decision brings relief, they feel just slightly better, and can formulate a plan.
Sometimes it is that medication is just kicking in and gives them more energy.
But when they first seem to turn the corner, is when they feel good enough to do what they have wanted for so long.
My nephew was three days onto anti depressants. That is enough time to have body chemistry change, but not the feelings of wanting to die. That body chemistry is the key. Only it has to be fixed. It’s is tricky. When there is low “feel good” chemicals there is no energy, so the person is “safe” in that they are too apathetic to figure out how to get enough pills to do the job. Or it is just too much work to find a cliff to drive off. This is why guns are so dangerous to have close by and handy. If the gun is right there, it does not take much energy to get it out of the drawer and stick it in your mouth and pull the trigger.
The decision to “end it” is a difficult decision and depression makes it impossible to make big decisions. So the depressed person thinks about it, but mostly it is a wish to just quit living, quit thinking. And deciding to actually kill yourself is too big to think through. So, it just sits there.
With people like me who mask long term depression, it is kind of a split off part of reality. It is there, but we don’t think about it. There is day to day survival which we manage by putting the problem in a box and shutting the lid, then sitting on the box so we can’t open it. We get pretty good at acting like nothing is wrong. Usually because at some level, our life depends on nobody finding out there is a problem. We use our high functioning as mask.
Sorry if this is kind of a long ramble.
Thank you for sharing. In a perfect world we can all have this level of transparency, learning from and through each other without fear and without over generalizing one person’s experience.
These can be difficult to respond to, both out of respect for your experience, the vulnerability of sharing one’s own, and perhaps the relative uniqueness of such experiences.
My own analogous intense spiritual experiences were centered around discovering a brain tumor, the trauma of having it removed and related complications (which were many), the process of healing, the brain swelling and seizures through it all, and the deathishness of it all.
Simultaneously, spiritually, this was an experience of intense peace, connection, vision, ideas, creativity and light. Clinically there are explanations for any otherworldly experiences I experienced. While religious tendencies can be deceiving or overwrought, western thought and medicine can also be dammingly arrogant and entrenched, cold, blind. Neither is the proprietor of truth and life. Both can be contributors.
I personally choose to err on the side of the inclusionary, rather than the exclusionary. My guides of discernment are peace, expansiveness, comprehension and kindness.
As it turns out, researching after the fact, there is a well established connection between brain trauma, seizures and religious experience. For some, that discredits any metaphysical experience. For me, it credits the physical experience.
Thanks Janey, and fair question! I think they do talk sometimes. Not as much about the mental illness, but about growing up. They tend to form strategic alliances with each other and against the others. Alliances they sometimes betray. Ha! It all sounds dramatic, but I’m not sure how else to put it.
One of these alliances recently ended with two of them living next to each other, each trying to get the other excommunicated!
My mom has taken the path of trying to forgive her (long dead) father. A noble desire, I think, but cynically, I’m afraid she has other motives. She is a Jesus-and
-Temple Mormon. This has been a moderating influence on some of her worst impulses. This isn’t always the case! I’d guess Lori Daybell is a priesthood-Joseph-Smith-modern revelation Mormon, to disastrous consequences. Forgiveness is the Lords way, and I’m afraid in my mom’s case, a direct rejection of the way of modern medicine. I think she also hopes forgiving her father will open a path for her children to forgive her.
My mom knows when, and with whom, she needs to act rationally to avoid being confronted. I’ve sometimes tried to poke at her ungrounded reasoning or revelations, trying to destabilize her thoughts just enough to have a more honest, reality based conversation. Sometimes, this works with other people I care about in similar situations. It never works with her though. There’s always a well fortified motte behind her bailey.
Thanks for being so vulnerable and sharing such an interesting part of your life, Janey. By my observation, just as some people have instinctive or natural talent at sports, art, music, math, etc., there are some who are naturally attuned to spiritualism and religion. They are the people who talk about God or the spirit guiding their lives and giving them inspiration on a constant basis. They’re always talking about how the spirit told them to do this or that, no matter how big or how trivial the matter. I’ve always thought that such people were genetically disposed to having those feelings. They’re the ones who, depending on their culture/society, often become shaman, medicine men/women, preachers, or prophets (Joseph Smith, anyone?). And when you look at the really great artists, musicians, intellectuals, and religious founders over time, isn’t it quite common to see that many or most of them had a mental illness or personality disorder to go along with their great talent? I don’t know why that is, but there does seem to be a connection.
The other major factor needed for visions, revelation and inspiration is true belief. Look at less educated but highly religious or superstitious cultures and you will find lots of experiences and stories involving heavenly visions (exhibit A being the Holy Virgin), revelations, or, in the alternative, demonic possessions. But in highly educated secular societies, Satan doesn’t seem to make himself known – same with Mary, God and the angels. Religious people will say lack of faith/belief is the reason for absence of heavenly visions, but how do you explain lack of demonic possessions? The best cure for that is, ironically, lack of faith/belief and refutation of their existence.
Sorry people, but you are going to be hearing from me a lot with this post. My daughter who thinks I am on the autism spectrum would tell me it is the intersection of three of my autistic obsessions. Those obsessions would be religion, psychology, and spiritual/weird experiences. Then my daughter would ask why I couldn’t have been obsessed with trains or dinosaurs like a “normal” autistic. (that is, male autistic)
But since my experience is so much like Janey’s, it hits on questions that have bothered me for years.
So, ya’know, I will never know if you just skip my posts. So, feel free to ignore me. Not only will I not be offended, I won’t know.
I am thinking on what Bryce Cook said. I do not think having “spiritual experiences” is genetic or runs in families or is even what we would call an individual trait, as in some people are just born more spiritual. Yes, some people do seem to have them and others don’t. But to me, I see it as more “according to need” or situational or caused by mental illness or depression. I have had people say how much they wish they could have even a fraction of what I have had, mostly when my husband tells his friends. But I had literally had my social work clients find out I am Mormon and join the church because they think it might be my religion. I try to talk them out of it because even in the best of times, I didn’t really believe. I DON’T think it is my religion. And I have never told my clients any of my private experiences. They see something that they want. It is strange but there is something my clients used to see in me that they saw as spiritual and a kind of peace that they want. It wasn’t just once, but several times one of my clients investigated or joined the church. They would try to talk to me about it and I REALLY didn’t know what to say.
Maybe that is the same trait that people saw in Janey that she describes as charisma. But I am not a great speaker, at all. I was a good teacher, except that was never the callings I was given at church. And I was good with my clients. After I left a couple of places, I found out they had turned me into some kind of saint. One place, my brother went to that agency and he was shocked that couple years later, I was held in a kind of awe.
But this “spiritual experiences” trait changes during a person’s life time. Because when I was living with serious depression I had them, and they quit when I was not depressed. But they were more about my children, or my father than they were about religion. I never once “felt the Holy Ghost.”
Near Death Experiences are universal to all cultures. *Who* people meet while dead depends on their religion. Christians meet Jesus, sort of thing. And those with no religion describe meeting someone who is loving, seems to know them, and glows. “Being of light” rather than Jesus. Or sometimes they just have an out of body experience.
And trauma can cause an out of body experience. Been there, done that. And an out of body experience could be a form of dissociation. But other forms of dissociation are weird, like someone with multiple personality disorder can be physically sick or have allergies that other personalities don’t have. I had one sexual abuse client who dissociated and “went to be with Jesus” and it was very spiritual. But the memory of that was really pushing her toward suicide. Kind of “if that is what death is like, I want that now.”
Psychologists cannot explain some of the ways people dissociate. What goes on in the brain when someone has multiple personalities? They cannot explain out of body experiences or NDE.
Yet, if we have souls that can leave our body, or there is some kind of cosmetic consciousness, or “god” then it could explain some of the unexplainable. Because some of my experiences are really unexplainable.
Anna – yes! I’ve always felt like we have a lot in common too. Humans have an ability to adapt to abnormal and harmful patterns and just survive around them. As I got further into the healing process, I remember talking to a therapist about how I was still suicidal but I didn’t actually want to die. He asked if they were escape fantasies. He was right! They weren’t always like that, but as I was making progress towards healing, those thoughts hung on as a way to escape things I didn’t want to deal with. I started using them as an indicator to unearth yet another issue to deal with.
I remember you’ve talked before about profound spiritual experiences, and at the end of your comment you said that you didn’t know if you’d say depression caused them. I don’t think depression causes those types of experiences. My thought is that they’re linked, but not causative.
Bryce Cook’s comment was what I was getting at. A lot of cultures see these types of experiences and have differing attitudes. Joseph Smith would get put on anti-psychotics if he was having visions today. Other cultures acknowledge some people have insights and connections that others don’t – shamans, and etc. I read a book by a woman who said her son moved out of the country and found a place for himself in a culture that didn’t treat schizophrenia as a horrible disability. I forget the details.
bhbardo – I would never put an essay online that is this personal if I wasn’t using a pseudonym. I’ve had this post written for more than six months before I decided to post it. Yeah, this is hard and it’s a risk, but I want to talk about it. Thanks for sharing about your brain tumor and what sort of experiences that produced. The human brain is so complex, and the fact that religious/otherworldly experiences can be connected to specific areas in the brain don’t discredit their otherworldly nature. It has to connect with us somewhere. Like, I know there is something odd/unique/difficult about my brain chemistry and my thought patterns, but I also know that I’ve had experiences and connections outside myself. Like Anna, there is no way to explain some of my experiences as just saying my subconscious was doing it.
We’re all supposed to feel the spirit and get answers to our prayers, and yet if you say you do that AND you have a pretty serious diagnosis, then your spirituality is suddenly a symptom? I know mental illness still carries a strong stigma. Being religious is getting more and more stigmatized too. I’ve got a post about that.
AnonForThis – that is fascinating. At some point in your life, you must have realized your mom’s way of thinking wasn’t something you wanted in your own life. Was that frightening for you? I know my siblings talk about their fears of ending up like dad. No one can get past my dad’s ability to deflect and deny any issues exist. My dad has always been very TBM also. It gave him a framework for his experiences, I’d guess, and since he was a man, it also gave him some natural authority. He also rejected regular medicine and was all about alternative medicine. Like, he made a choice about what reality he wanted to live in. I chose science and the tangible world. He chose revelations and paranoia. He had lucid periods. He could have gotten treatment if he wanted. Are you angry at your mom? Do you think she could have gotten better if she’d been willing to try modern medicine? I want to post about how forgiveness works in these really longstanding and traumatic situations. I feel like I’ve forgiven my father, but it didn’t heal the relationship at all.
I was thinking at first that it sounded like you might have that newly identified form of bipolar where the person only has hypomanic episodes instead of full manic episodes, so I admit you fooled me when you said the first psych diagnosed you with bipolar. I reasoned that whole your descriptions didn’t sound like manic episodes to me, but manic episodes sometimes don’t seem all that unreasonable from the point of view of the one having them. But I think your second doctor’s diagnosis fits everything pretty well.
It’s not something I’ve ever discussed with someone outside my family, but having detailed visions of the future that then happen exactly is something that several of my immediate family members have had. As a kid I just assumed that most LDS families had similar experiences and just didn’t talk about it because it’s super socially unacceptable to.
I personally have never had a vision of the future, but even I’ve known specific things were going to happen with more detail than I can reasonably explain. Most of the time they’ve been knowledge that certain specific bad things were going to happen to me in the near future but I and my family would end up ok.
Janey, thanks so much for sharing such initimate details of your life. It’s really very interesting to hear about your experiences.
I find your experiences so interesting because my life experiences are quite different. I have only very rarely felt like I’ve recieved any profound insight or guidance from some supernatural force outside of myself. As a result, I am pretty skeptical when others claim to have had such experiences. After all, if I’m not having them, then why are others having them? I am open to some people being more gifted at receiving these experiences than others, but how does it make sense for me to be *so* bad at receiving them? I honestly would have a difficult time believing that any of these experiences (from anyone) are real if I hadn’t had a small number of experiences myself. My experiences are few and quite underwhelming compared with those claimed by others, yet they still seem real.
The Church’s heavy emphasis on having members receive “spiritual experiences” has also increased my skepticism. When I was younger, I’m quite confident that I talked myself into believing that I’d received some of these experiences when I really hadn’t. It’s obvious to me that many of the experiences that are shared at church are similarly not “real”.
Your post ends in kind of a cliffhanger for me. You feel like you had these spiritual experiences–and you’re describing them in ways that sound more compelling than the typical things I hear at church–before receiving good mental health treatment. However, once you finally received good mental health treatment (and I’m so happy you are feeling better now!), you say the spiritual experiences have stopped. So, the obvious thing for someone with my own life experience (very limited spiritual experiences) would be to conclude that your spiritual experiences originated from your previous mental health issues. The cliffhanger is where you say you feel like at least some of those experiences that you had were very real, yet they stopped when you received good mental health care.
It sounds like you may have more to say on that in future posts. If so, I’ll be interested in hearing more about this.
I am as nonspiritual as they come and I think everything is tmi. When someone comes up to me and introduces themself,–I’m like, why did you give me your name, I didn’t ask you for it. Tmi.
This whole discussion reminds of a lecture I watched on youtube “Religious Belief” by the neuroscientist(and atheist) Robert Sapolsky.
It’s been a few years since I watched it, but as I remember it, the question is why schizophrenia persists across all cultures even though it’s maladaptive. I believe the explanation was the Shaman hypothesis (which many psychiatrists criticize) and suggested a link between Schizotypal personality disorder and leadership in many religious traditions. Hear the voices at the wrong time bad, but at the right time and you benefit your group.
I don’t know what counts as a profound spiritual experience in any time period. Nowadays I mainly read about negative ones in the news and pronouncements by governmental leaders who hear the voices at the wrong time.
So I am hard put to think of any positive ones, but I have to admit those cave paintings didn’t paint themselves.
The theory about shaman and religious leaders being schizophrenic, well it really does not fit with my spiritual experiences. I was told things that no living human could know yet and every one of them turned out 100% true. Nothing like hallucinations.
But I read a book once about religious leaders being of a specific pattern of narcissism and sociopathic personality disorder, and it really fit Joseph Smith, although he was not an example used. So, my theory of “religious leaders” that start religions is that one. Doesn’t fit Jesus, but we really don’t know much about the historical Jesus. It does fit Mohamed.
And I can see how some shaman used psychedelic drugs to induce “visions.” And that is historically true.
I can tell exactly why my spiritual experiences quit, and while it did coincide with the end of my depression, that was the cause. My spiritual experiences stopped because I am pissed at the whatever intelligence is out there that we call God. Unfair of me because my reason was not the fault of whatever it is we call God. It was the Mormon church that betrayed me and made me pissed at God, but I just no longer trust whatever it is I used to pray to. *I* cut off the spiritual experiences.
It has been 20 years, but I do not want God back in my life enough to do the emotional work of separating out the intelligence in the universe from “Mormon God”. I never liked the Mormon concept of God very much because he loves his sons more than his daughters. But I don’t know what the truth is about God and I don’t know how to separate out all the crap I was taught about God from whatever the being is that I used to connect to. Just not worth the emotional effort and I will find out when I die or not. Whatever.
I can’t explain my spiritual experiences with any of the theories scientists toss out, like schizophrenia or things bubbling up from the subconscious. That is part of why the whole subject fascinates me. I am very scientific minded and “intelligence out there in the universe” that can communicate with us is *not* scientific.
Janey, Anna and all posters to Janey’s article: This conversation will save lives and help many people struggling with these issues. Thanks for your transparency and willingness to release this to our community.
Cheers Friends
I must admit I’ve run out of time so wasn’t able to read every comment thoroughly, but a few scattershot thoughts:
1) I get the sense, just a little bit, from a few lines in the OP and a few comments that I did catch, that there is somewhat of an unspoken assumption that spiritual experiences have to be tethered to level of church participation. I’m sure I’m wrong on that and read too quickly – but just the fact that a spiritual experience was mentioned in the same sentence as not having been to church in X number of years or what-have-you, led me to that sense. But to me, that is not always hand in hand. Without diving into the theories about whether some are genetically predisposed to this or that, or chemicals etc – I believe, and feel like I’ve witnessed, God working with all sorts of people, from all sorts of walks of life, in all sorts of “spiritual health.” We are all imperfect, as we all know, and to me it is of no surprise if God works with us whether we “go to church” or not. I think the “going to church” angle is not about making ourselves worthy for spiritual experiences, but to try and help propel us along a path with a goal in mind. But I digress on that. I just want to say that to me, spiritual experiences are not reserved for only those who check the right boxes.
2) Aside from the classical diagnoses, like bipolar etc., have you considered the possibility of AuDHD. It is those with traits of autism and ADHD in one spectacularly messy combination. The traits can fight with each other, and thus manifest as possibly bipolar etc., but they can also mean that someone who “crashes” like you described can also be super charismatic and compelling. Just a thought in terms of trying to understand ourselves better.
3) I’m glad you’re here still, and not trotted off to the celestial kingdom yet.
Bryce Cook mentions the influence of local cultures, which I think can’t be understated. In the 30+ years since my mission in Ukraine I’ve been pondering the question of why our missionary efforts in the early 1990s saw more success than any of the neighboring countries, leading eventually to the first LDS temple in the region. I think economic conditions and cultural attitudes toward religious pluralism are very important, but I would also have to say that there was a strong culture of spiritualism there, which seems to me an important factor. Folk magic, dreams and visions were all a strong part of the culture. It was not unlike what I’ve read about the burned over district of New York in the time of Joseph Smith. People seemed to have far more intense spiritual experiences than I’ve ever had. We interpret our inner emotional lives through the lens of the culture we come from. Get out of that culture or changes the state of our emotions through mental health treatments, and those experiences can change quite significantly.
There was a teenage convert in one branch on my mission who got up every testimony meeting and told of having seen Jesus. The missionaries definitely questioned his sanity and referred to him as “the prophet” among ourselves. But from the perspective that other people’s minds are given to different types of spirituality than I am, it’s possible that his mind was just wired that way, and he had a particular interpretation of the experiences he was having based on his culture. He definitely hadn’t been Mormon long enough to understand the implicit taboo against anyone who isn’t an apostle implying from the pulpit that they have seen Jesus.
Anna
The Shaman hypothesis doesn’t address the accuracy of visions. It doesn’t claim that religious leaders are schizophrenic or have schizoid personality disorder.
The question is why does schizophrenia persist across cultures in low rates, even though it is maladaptive.
It was compared to sickle cell anemia. Getting sickle cell anemia bad, but getting one copy provides protection against malaria. Clearly schizophrenia bad, but having schizotypal traits i.e. magical beliefs in religion or science fiction may provide an evolutionary advantage. “Normal” people don’t cosplay and go to Star Trek .conventions. But many in the scientific fields have trekkies and/or trekkers contributing to human advancement.
Even though I am not spiritual in any way, i am a firm believer in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. (or to use the Vulcan term Kol-Ut-Shan)
Lots to think about here. My first thoughts were that I experienced a lot of what I now think is religious-based / family-based depression as a teen. Maybe it was hormonal. Maybe just part of growing up. Maybe stuff that was driven by feeling like I had nothing to look forward to in the constricted life I saw ahead of me. I never had a diagnosis, but eventually I didn’t feel that way, but I also did. Maybe it was masking as you say. I once had a reiki massage which, while I think it’s probably just BS from a science perspective, nevertheless, the practitioner pointed out that my solar plexus was basically a dead zone, and that’s where your own desires reside, and when he said that I thought “Well yeah, that about sums it up” because as a person in a high demand religion, particularly as a woman, you are not allowed to even think about what you want, let alone pursue it (and yet I pursued things I wanted more than most do–but still, I am aware that I often held myself back and within the constraints that were given me).
My next observation is that some of what you said reminded me of Jennette McCurdy’s autobiography I’m Glad My Mother’s Dead. She was raised LDS by a mother who was pretty controlling and kind of crazy, and she absolutely adored church as a stabilizing influence in her life, even though her mother often had to be prodded to get out the door. She thrived in that environment. (Later she left the church as an adult, but that observation of hers was interesting).
And lastly, because of the link between mental illness and spirituality, I couldn’t help but think of several of the Catholic Saints whose stories are examples of this. Teresa of Avila is the first one I thought of, but there are many more.
My attitude about Church up until about 30 was that I loved it. I loved the structure. I loved the clear rules. I loved that I knew exactly what authority figures wanted me to do and they praised me for it. A lot of my self-esteem depended on authority figures approving of me and Church was a great place to fill that need.
mountainclimber – I have a full essay to post about why and when my spiritual experiences stopped. A lot of it had to do with Dialectical Behavior Therapy. To oversimplify, the experiences didn’t stop but I stopped leaning into them. At Church, we are taught to act on our promptings quickly, to lean into them, to seek to have more of them. It was basically the worst advice ever for someone like me. Now, thanks to that specific therapy, when I feel a “spiritual experience” coming on, I can dial it down, understand it isn’t something I should lean into, and sort of surf the urge until it goes away. The reason I didn’t want those experiences anymore is because they came packaged with the bad experiences. The good times started to scare me because I knew the bad times were coming. Riding a roller coaster is fun when you’re young. Once you’re older, all those ups and downs are exhausting.
Quentin – we both served in Ukraine, right? I remember the paranormal fascination. The word was an English cognate: Extrasense. My observation was that if someone was already actively participating in Extrasense, they wouldn’t get interested in Church. But the vibe of those sorts of experiences probably did make conversion easier. I hadn’t connected that before. That’s an interesting observation.
A book that I discovered after my intense tumor-related spiritual experiences, that has been important to me, is ‘Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond’, by Brook Ziporyn, 2024.
Ziporyn seems to mostly be a scholar of “eastern” religions and draws a lot of parallels and contrasts, between “eastern” and “western” philosophy and religion. The book is fairly dense philosophically, but still accessible. I discovered it via a T&S post that referenced a mormon studies article that responded to an appendix of the book.
In that appendix section, essentially just an exploratory footnote, the author describes a “crypto-Mormon” reading of the Lotus Sutra, a foundational text for many schools of Buddhism. Essentially, that the eternal process of becoming bodhisattvas and Buddhas, and the idea that the Buddha only exists to nurture other beings into Buddhahood, is a buddhified version of monotheism, correlating to the mormon view of becoming gods. (Or, you could say, that mormonism is a Christifed version of buddhism.) And that all beings will eventually become buddhas/gods, if and when they want to. Again, this section is not the main premise of the book.
The book does explore many ideas of infinity (for me, aka eternity) and infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and how these give rise to the spiritual experiences that many in these comments here describe, to oneness, to a oneness that includes everything, not excluding anything.
(My thought: what is the atonement if not the truth of all things, the united opposition of all things, the comprehension of all things, the through-ness of the divine in all things?)
For the purposes of this author, atheism equals amonotheism. Mystical atheism is a subset of atheism. Polytheism is a form of atheism as it rejects the idea that a MonoDeity, that exists beyond eternity, is in control of everything. He often quotes Nietzsche: “Just this is divinity, that there are gods but no God.”
Another key idea: the universe is ultimately purposeless, but this does not preclude purpose. Many purposeful worlds/plans (worlds without end) can be borne out of the infinite purposelessness.
Relatedly, that the finite is an expression of the infinite.
And, just so many paradoxes. Don’t read this if you don’t want to explore paradoxes. Or do read this if you want to get more comfortable with paradoxes. Like, for example, how the mental illness or the brain trauma that could be killing me is simultaneously a creative power of life.
I’m going to come back and re-read the post and the comments. Then I will hopefully be able to better contribute to the discussion.
I really appreciate everyone’s transparency, honesty, and vulnerability. The thoughts expressed have started some intense self-evaluation, hence needing to come back to add more.
Again, thank you.
No one ever thinks of the brain when it comes to religion or spiritual experience or health for that matter. It’s this organ enclosed in bone that we know little about (well, we know a lot more than we used to) and it is organ that interprets all of reality for us and facilitates consciousness. It is capable of compensating for a plethora of issues in a way that makes the brain transparent. And because no one thinks about the brain, often people keep chasing their tails when issues arise because they attribute issues to things that aren’t the root. There is definitely something to be said about “being wired for something.” I have a really good friend that went through a really dark, dark night of soul and coming out of that involved learning more about how his brain works, getting treatment for ADHD and leaving religion. He became convinced that he just wasn’t wired for it at all. And it just makes so much sense to me now. One of my biggest disappointments has been recognizing that issues with the brain or mind altering substances cause a lot of the visionary/spiritual experiences we find meaningful. I was particularly annoyed when I found out that substances tested on ancient Israelite temple alters turned out to be canabis. For me it begs the question: is any of it actually real? From a person’s own lived it experience it can be real and I acknowledge that having had experiences myself. But from an objective point of view, does God or heaven or any of this other stuff exist outside the brain?
I remember the day (yes, the specific day) everything collapsed for me. I had been discovering things that didn’t add up in the church–the cracks were all there plain as day. I tried out a LDS fundamentalist group in Provo I was invited to. That group turned out just to be a special mixture of ultra-right politics and JS worshipping that was repulsive to me. After I left that meeting, I went into what I can only describe as the darkest depression I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t read, I was so emotional all the time. It passed after a couple of weeks. Looking back, I should have gone to a professional but I thought it was something spiritual that had latched on. To this day I’ve never experienced something else like it and I know there are people that experience that every day of their lives. I don’t know how they do it–they are certainly stronger and more resilient than me.
So, I thank you tremendously for sharing. We do not talk about mental health in relation to the religious experience nearly enough. In fact, i think in a lot of cases, the religious experience is masking the real issues that need immediate addressing.
Janey, I hope you write that piece you mentioned about in the last few comments. I’m looking forward to reading that piece about forgiveness.
The following text is from an article in today’s Deseret News:
Centrally planned economies fail, he argued, because relevant economic knowledge does not exist in a concentrated form. It exists in “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” No agency or committee has it all. Assuming it does is what Hayek called the “fatal conceit.” The only way to utilize this local, tacit knowledge is to leave decision-making power in the hands of those who possess it. Doing so fills the blind spots of any individual perspective and enables a level of coordination, innovation and prosperity that centralized economies cannot hope to achieve.
The article was on universities and whether they pursue truth or orthodoxy, but I think the principle goes beyond economics. I think the principle also applies to God (or divinity or otherworldly). God (the Holy Ghost) works with individuals far more than with institutions, and each individual has his or her own interactions, whether or not recognized or understood.