Seeking Recommendation Books and articles about how to differ occult practices from mental illnesses

[shockwave_punk]

Hello. I'm a heavily skeptical and heavily experienced spiritual person at the same time. So I'm often wondering and second guessing what's real/what's my imagination and what actually works in my practice. Although I myself do not have any sort of hallucinatory disorder, I've always wondered about the thin line between the occult and mental health issues because of new age spirituality misinformation in social media and past bad experiences with people who were not ready for the occult.

Here are some examples for my personal doubts: how to differ gnosis, premonitions and assumption methods from psychosis; how to differ channeling/possession from dissociative identity disorders and also visual/auditory practices from schizophrenia. I had a few former friends who used to be spiritual but either ended up in the hospital due to psychotic episodes or eventually were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other personality disorders with hallucinatory symptoms. And that scared the hell of out me and pushed me to extensively research about that matter.

So do any of you have occult books or general psychological/psychiatric researches recomendations that dive into the differences between solid spiritual/magical/witchcraft practices and mental health issues/disorders? Thanks!

 

[h4rrow]

Have you read much of Josephine McCarthy's writing? And if so, does it resonate? In my experience, her writing tends toward concern over the veracity and 'objectivity' of magical practice. For example, in the first module of Quareia, wherein she advises to treat all (initial) visionary experiences as real, it's yet within a framework of practice meant to bring the apprentice toward contact with objective spiritual forces. At the same time, the practices themselves are couched in 'guardrails' that frame specific zones of potential experience as subject to delusive or potentially deleterious phenomena. Therefore, the end result, with firm boundaries written into the sand of the path, is that eventually the diligent apprentice is trained by practice to discern between 'real contact', personal imagination, and actively distracting delusions.

But this is all just an example of the kinds of safeties that can be built into a system in order to navigate the line you're talking about—not necessarily a recommendation in itself, which is why I ask if she and her writing resonate. Other such solutions could include practice that minimally employs the visionary mind and is very physically rooted, like a goetic or ceremonial ritual practice (which also have their own 'guardrails', like the manner of questioning the conjured spirit); or, perhaps, working within a religious tradition which has likely had thousands of years to navigate this exact problem and has, built in, its own guardrails and limitations.

Personally, I imagine looking for psychiatric or psychological studies treading this line would lead to a dead end. I imagine so because the 'clinical norm' in these fields (beyond any specific compassionate individuals and communities who likely still exist besides that norm) is to treat any deviance from a baseline as illness, and within that norm that baseline tends to exclude magical reality from mundane life's possibilities. However, if you find anything fruitful in that direction it would probably be immensely valuable to this community to share the message; otherwise, I think what you're looking for can be found (in less literally exact terms) throughout the literature—just keep your eyes and ears peeled for what's considered harmful, evil, distracting, impure, basically everything that smells 'off-limits' etc. and then wonder why it might be considered so.