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Meditation Related Schizophrenoid Recactions

sekio

sekio

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So on Reddit today someone posted this paper:

Background: Meditation is a self-regulatory psychological strategy that is frequently applied in Western as well as non- Western countries for different purposes; little is known about adverse events.

Sampling and Methods: A male patient is described who developed an acute and transient psychosis with polymorphic symptomatology after meditating. A literature search for psychotic states related to meditation was carried out on PubMed, Embase and PsycInfo.
Click to expand...

http://www.reddit.com/r/DrugNerds/c...induced_psychosis_can_someone_get_the/c5ka1wh

It turns out this kind of thing is fairly common, especially when sleep deprivation or fasting are involved.

This provides some modicum of evidence to the idea that a lot of the "damage" from bad psychedelic experience is entirely mental. If you can drive yourself into a schzioid worry just by meditating....
 
Its actually beyond extremely ironic that this thread comes up now, because I've been meditating daily for a long time, and have been experiencing a debilitating psychotic problem for a significant period of time; I also had more than one bad trip on a hallucinogen. I recently decided to stop meditating as much and/or eventually stop meditating, and the problem seems to be receding. I can elaborate in pm if you want.
 
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I never noticed any negative effect except when meditating for an extended period of time when fasting. I don't know that I would describe it as schizoid, but my doctor certainly did. If meditation is used increasingly, we'll probably see more of this in the west. Meditation certainly helps people, but like most things, it can be done to excess. I've never noticed the really good, enjoyable effects of meditation unless I did so for at least an hour, but I never found the benefit to increase beyond the third hour, either, so now if I do it, I usually stop right around 60-90 minutes and I'm good.

I wonder if it's less common with guided meditation.
 
I can entertain the idea.. but i think this seems like a "causality - correlation" issue. after all, these experiences involve the one uniform state of mind. maybe this "schizophrenia" is more of a chronic hypochondriasis. i think meditation seems powerful, but could also inflict tension, like maybe Ho Chi Minh stated.
 
Its an extremely powerful existentialism, which necessarily leads to inhumanity in daily interactions, an anhedonia resulting from the inability to connect, and paranoid tendencies.
 
This is pretty ironic because I was engaging in one of the most non-religious (or "out there", if you will) meditations known to man, in the form of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. It was developed in Massachusetts by an MD named Jon Kabat Zinn as a purely medicinal practice; it comes down to tuning into all sensations of one's body, and is meant to cement one in their existence, but ultimately threw myself so deeply into myself that I lost contact with others. I should also note that, importantly, I do isolate myself to an extreme and unhealthy extent from other people and have done a fair amount of drugs. If I had even normal social connections and didn't abuse any chemicals, then I seriously doubt this illness would have manifested--both of these things could theoretically cause such a crises on their own, ha, but meditation imbues one with such a strength or contentment that they wouldn't feel the otherwise very strong pull towards social interactions once their brain started feeling hungry.

It would be really nice to see more posts for this one :\.
 
Did you read the paper red22 posted above? Pretty interesting.

Yeah it would be great to get more responses, unfortunately? I can't really add anything. Do you have any more links from that site red22? I can't get anything else without a subscription.
 
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