How Many People Have Psychic Powers Misdiagnosed as Psychotic Disorders?

In the movie Sixth Sense, a psychiatrist meets up with a young boy who claims to see dead people and interact with them. The psychiatrist spends the better part of the film trying to understand the boy and bring him out of his delusion. In the end, it turns out that the psychiatrist gains the realization that he was shot by one of his earlier patients, and he is himself a dead person! The child’s experience was true, the perception of it from the side of psychiatry was mis-diagnosed. In this case, the child with the psychic ability to interact with dead people helped heal the ghost of the psychiatrist!

In what may be something of a characteristic incident, a young man began experiencing various types of spiritual experiences, and receiving guidance about his life focus and direction. He eventually dropped out of college and went off to study and practice yoga. After several years, he met his parents who had objected strenuously to his change in life direction, his ‘failure’ to complete college and his lack of a career path. They insisted he meet with a psychiatrist to get himself straightened out. In this case he refused, went on to a long life committed to his yogic practice, integrated it into a full and balanced life, and eventually found his peace with his parents. How many such individuals face a similar circumstance? How many wind up on the psychiatrist’s couch? How many try to conform to the family’s insistent demands, thereby suppressing their spiritual aspirations?

In many cases the individual himself is confused about what is happening. He has imbibed a set of expectations, he feels the pressures from his family and friends, and he is subject to the norms of the society within which he lives. Suddenly he finds that he is experiencing things that fall outside all of those norms and expectations. He finds his direction moving contrary to those that he has accepted throughout his life up to that time. He does not know how to adjust and reconcile the inner experiences with the outer life he is leading. This can lead to behaviour that appears disoriented and may actually mimic psychiatric disorder, not because it is, but because the individual has not found the way to reconcile the inner experience with the outer life, and he does not have the support and guidance needed to integrate them into a harmonious life. The solution is not to treat this as a disorder, but to go to the underlying experiences and help the individual appreciate the deeper and true sense of what he is experiencing.

Dr. Dalal writes: “Psychiatrists tend to look upon persons who apparently possess psychic powers as abnormal; that is, suffering from a psychiatric disorder. Dr. Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles and author of Second Sight (Thomas Moore, 1997) writes that she displayed paranormal abilities since the age of nine, but for years refrained from speaking about them because her mother and others around showed no understanding of these abilities and gave her the feeling she was abnormal. It was only when, after an out-of-body experience, she was seen at an institute for ESP that she learned that she was gifted rather than psychiatrically ill. According to her estimate, perhaps based mainly on her own practice of psychiatry, about twenty-five percent of those who seek psychiatric help and are diagnosed as suffering from psychosis are in fact psychic rather than psychotic.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Introduction, pg. xi