Assessing clinical implications of spiritual experiences

Abstract

Since spiritual experiences (SE) very often resemble dissociative and psychotic symptoms, there is a risk of misdiagnosis in both directions: labeling a healthy SE as a mental disorder or taking a mental disorder as an SE. There is a scarcity of well-controlled studies on this subject. The paper provides a brief overview of studies on dissociative and psychotic experiences in the non-clinical population, especially those occurring in spiritual populations. At the end, some guidelines are proposed to help clinical reasoning when making the differential diagnosis between healthy SE with psychotic and dissociative experiences and mental disorders that may resemble SE.