For me, "psychosis" is a spiritual experience, but not one I undertake willingly.  I believe in a God and a Goddess and when I am psychotic I connect with them.  I underwent a psychotic experience about a week ago and recovered in a few days of taking anti psychotic medication.  This time I couldn't help thinking about the purpose of "madness", I think it is either a result of traumatic life experiences or a symptom of the materialistic society in which we live.  When things are wrong people go mad; when people were taken as slaves, the desire to escape was pathologised as a mental illness, also slaves were accused of contacting evil spirits through Voodoo and black magic (today in our society that would be seen as madness).  When the Puritan's tried to enforce a form of Cristianity that surpressed life and living (ie. music, dance and contact with earth spirits and Mother Earth) people went "mad" and were burnt at the stake for witch craft (most famously in Salem).  I have a love of God and the Goddess and because of this I have been defined as mad and having bi polar disorder.  I think the psychiatrist is mad, because of his need to feel superior he has defined himself as a reality expert and see's my beliefs as symptomatic of a brain disease.  Many psychiatrists belief that there is no God and instead worship sience, in my mind this is madness!

Thanks Karen, I loved your post. Actually, our inner lives/inner worlds are so subjective, aren't they? I respect EVERYONE'S inner reality as reality, no matter if they are a saint or a madman. Sometimes there is a very thin line, anyways. I know a schizophrenic who has spiritual warfare going on inside all the time. I respect what he's dealing with, and while most people say it's hallucinations, it's actually real to him and so it's real. The only downside is that he can't control it, can't turn it off for a while and rest. But it's been said that the psychotic is drowning in the same ocean that the mystic is swimming with ease. At times I have had a "dark night of the soul", where I certainly feel crazy and am in a hell of sorts. It's very very spiritual and more real to me than the "real" world that we all share in common (the outer world).

I totally agree with you, I've also always respected everyones experience as real and as a result been told about spiritual and psychological warfare.  I believe that we all have a tiny piece of that greater picture, no one can totally understand God or existence in its entirety; by listening and trying to understand everyone, we can get to know more about our place in the universe. 

You don't even need to understand or believe in a spiritual world to understand certain concepts, for example I was introduced to the concept of spiritual and psychic vampirism years ago, but this is simply about how people make you feel.  Vampirism can also be described from a psychological perspective through transactional analysis, ie if you don't relate to people assertively, they can manipulate and control you through aggressive and passive aggressive behaviour; vampirism also describes the person who uses emotional blackmail in order to exert their wishes over yours.

Another concept that many people can't usually relate to is sorcery, but in my mind it means excercising control over others perception of reality and I see the media mogals as guilty of this.  In every "developed" civilisation the media controls our perceptions and it would be naieve to think that they are not acting in the interests of the people in "power".  Power itself is an illusion or game, if tomorrow we all woke up and decided we were no longer going to give our power to those in authority, authority would cease to exist!