Medical and spiritual explanations can coexist in understanding mental health experiences.

Spiritual crises may manifest as mental health issues and benefit from both medical and spiritual support.

Suffering can drive an intense search for meaning.

I’m sitting beside a brown, bald Santa Claus. Sort of. But instead of asking me what I want for Christmas, he’s asking me, “Who are you?”

It’s taken a long time, a plane ride from North America to India, and several psychotic/mystical/kundalini emergency episodes to finally get me sitting beside H. W. Poonja—this chubby, spiritual teacher dressed all in orange based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

The relentless depression and the terrifying, threatening idea that I would always feel this suicidally desperate were what really drove me there. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but I say it’s suffering.

I Don't Care What You Call It

After several beatific spiritual experiences that catapulted me into psychotic episodes, I was eventually hospitalized, prescribed medications, and offered treatment plans and tongue twisters of diagnoses. Doctors told me I had mild temporal lobe epilepsy and rapid-cycling bipolar 1 disorder with generalized anxiety disorder.

The help offered........

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