James Carpenter, an adjunct professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes in Aeon, “Most of modern psychiatry dismisses the idea that psychotic experience is a meaningful response to the condition of one’s life in favour of the view that the voices, the visions, come from meaningless disease. By contrast I’ve learned to distinguish between the ravages of chronic psychotic disorder in the long and persistently afflicted, and the kind of acute aberrations which can usually be better understood as a ‘spiritual emergency’ instead of an impersonal state of disease.”
