Spiritual Side Effects of Psychiatric Medication: From Helpful to Harmful

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I recently published a book exploring the complex relationship between psychiatric medication and spirituality. The book is based on the findings of a qualitative research study I completed in 2015, which I wrote about in an earlier post. It was the first study to identify Spiritual Side Effects (SSEs) as a non-pharmacological factor in psychiatric medication use. SSEs are any perceived effects concerning interactions between psychiatric medication and the spirituality of the user. Broadly speaking, the participants fell into one of two groups. The first group viewed psychiatric medication as spiritually helpful and enhancing, which correlated with greater wellness and recovery. The second group found it spiritually hindering and harmful, and subsequently experienced delays to health and recovery.

Of course, it is not possible to make sweeping generalizations about these findings which hold across cultures, or for long periods of time. Readers are trusted to keep the small sample size of the project in mind (twenty people), and to make their own judgments about the transferability of the findings, should parallels emerge which resonate with their own experience. My impression is that this phenomenon is relative to a significant minority of people, and my hope is that the book provides a sense of affirming relief. The larger narratives put forth by psychiatry and neuroscience often eclipse the equally important stories of lived experience. The easiest way to understand how people are engaging spiritually with their prescriptions is to hear it in their own words.

The focus of this article is on one particular SSE: how spiritual feelings of connectedness were impacted by medication, in both positive and negative ways. While everyone’s spiritual life is unique, several common themes of spirituality emerged from my study, and connectedness was one of them. Narrowing our attention will allow us to go deeper, rather than broader, into the subject. What follows is a sampling of direct quotes and extracts. People’s actual names and identifying information have been changed.

Medication Enhances Spirituality

Many people described feelings of connectedness to themselves, others, and the transcendent as central to their spirituality. Some of them perceived that psychiatric medication increased and enhanced these feelings. Eric didn’t think of himself as a very spiritual person.

“People talk about spirituality all the time in my circle, which is AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). You know, you have to have a spiritual life, spiritual principles, spiritual this, spiritual that. It goes right through me.”

Yet feeling connected is one thing he associates with spirituality:

“I think being connected is an important thing… When I share at an AA meeting, if I share honestly, truthfully about what’s going on, I feel connected and there is a spiritual element to that… When I play music, I feel most connected to people.”

It’s not as if Eric didn’t connect to others, or enjoy playing music, before he began taking an antidepressant three years ago. But he believes that it allows him to experience a deeper sense of connectedness:

“If you ask me what I would like to do today, I would say I would like to be by myself, I would like to just sit and sort of sulk, that’s my natural inclination, to sit and feel bad. So maybe it’s the medication that helps me not to give in to the temptation to sit and sulk. It’s a tool to enable me to be present in a way that I’m not able to when I’m so preoccupied with my fears. So I would say that medication allows me to have a fuller spiritual life.”

Like many users of medication, there was a level of ambiguity in Eric’s experience. Even as he spoke about the affirming effects on his relationships, he knew it was more complicated than that:

“It has had a positive impact on the things that are most important to me, my music, and my relationship with my wife, and it has enabled me to be a better son to my mom and dad. But, see, I’m attributing all of this to 15 milligrams of Buspar and it’s not just the medication as we both know, but it’s helped. I believe it has helped.”

Maria spoke about the uncertainty of her prescriptions this way:

“The thing is, it feels like I get relief from the meds but how do I really know that? Things get better, and things get worse. Because meds are so nebulous.”

Maria is a Catholic nun. She lives in a religious community and works as a hospital chaplain. She perceived that medication enhanced her spiritual connectedness to the divine not by increasing, but by decreasing the intensity of her spiritual feelings.

“My experience is that I’m still able to have spiritual intensity on the meds. And if anything, they seem like they keep it from getting too intense… I think that the meds and the other supports that I’ve chosen, keep me from being flooded. Yeah, that’s the only way I can say it. A couple years ago, I was in DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) and we got to take strings and make a boundary in the room as big as we wanted the boundary to be. And when I got to do that I stood up on a chair and I put the yarn up on the ceiling and then had it draped down. And what I was doing was, what I said to the therapist, is that I wanted a boundary from God. That I didn’t want God to be able to just overwhelm me all the time, or to kind of flood my senses.”

Anne is also a nun and hospital chaplain. Her work involves supporting people during illness and crisis, and connecting with them on a spiritual level. She credits psychiatric medication with allowing her to do her job.

“You know, today’s a day I can believe in who I am, and I can know that the people I touch will be different, and I will be different because of that. There comes a point where I say spiritually, I owe it to myself, and to everybody that I serve, to take that medication. Because that makes me the person who can sit and listen to you. Who can empathize with you. Who can say, I know what you’re feeling, and I promise you it will end. I promise you it’s not always going to be this bad. Medication allows me to do that piece of it.”

There are some people who think that because Anne is a religious figure, she shouldn’t be vulnerable to depression. It’s an attitude that troubles her.

“Some people would think because of my being a Sister of Mercy or a chaplain, religion would be the thing that I could grab onto. And a lot of times, in the middle of the depression, that’s the first thing that I throw out the door. It feels like everything around me is falling apart, including religion.”

Though she believes that the medication fortifies her spiritually, a persistent question for Anne is, “If I could be a stronger person spiritually, would I not need the medicine?” Anne knows that she has tremendous inner resources, yet she often sees her ability to be successful as inextricable from her prescriptions. The medication enhances her connection to herself:

“Every day, I take my medicine, and every day, it’s a choice to take it or not take it. Because I don’t like it. But I do know, that without it, I can’t be who I am.”

These quotes reveal how some people are experiencing SSEs positively, in ways that led to improved wellness. The journey toward recovery was supported by increased feelings of connectedness to oneself, others, and the transcendent. Now we will hear from people on the other side of the fence: those who felt that medication decreased or inhibited their feelings of spiritual connectedness.

Medication Hinders Spirituality

Many people reported that taking medication resulted in unwelcome, negative SSE’s which led to decreased wellness and delays in recovery. They described how they experienced diminished feelings of connectedness to themselves, others, and the transcendent. Joan is an artist and former school teacher. A big part of her spirituality is based on her feelings of connectedness to God:

“For me a lot of my spirituality and spiritual practice is about relating to what I’ll call God. I don’t think there’s like a God in the sky with a big white beard, pointing at us or anything. But I relate to a personal God, it’s the only way I can relate to that whole abstract sense of, there’s a God out there.”

When she was on high levels of psychiatric medication, it disrupted the connection:

“Looking back what I notice is that I was just kind of turned off to the world. Basically I was not able to discern anymore, and I didn’t realize it at the time. The main thing with the medicine though, is I think it just took away my ability to discern my relationship with God. It took away my ability to sense, what feels right and what feels wrong. What I couldn’t feel when I had the psychiatric drugs was what was in my heart.”

Hazel perceived a direct link between her emotions and her spiritual life. She talked about how the drugs created a disconnection within herself:

I don’t feel the joy that I used to feel, which is a sad way to be, if you’ve got such great beliefs about spirituality… I’d say we need those emotions to feel as a spiritual being. The medication blunts emotions. So I know I’m not experiencing life the same as other people… I don’t cry, which I’d love to have a good cry, because I feel as though I should cry. I’m not in awe of things… I don’t feel the joy in living and the joy in being spiritual.”

Lisa noted how her experience of disconnection changed when her prescription did. When I first interviewed her, she was taking Abilify. Abilify allows me to feel a certain amount of emotion, a certain amount of spiritualness.” Then, four months after our interview, she sent me an email:

I thought I would just write to you and update you on my thoughts about your research project, now that the medication has truly kicked in. When I spoke to you in March, I was still a bit fanciful, and still feeling connected to all things spiritual and loving. Now that I have been placed on a depot injection of Piportil (typical antipsychotic) I find that all spiritualness has gone from my mind and I am no longer connected in such ways.”

Frequently, people said that they did not recognize the negative SSEs until after they discontinued use. This was true in Tom’s case. It was only after swallowing his last pill that he saw how the medication had reinforced his propensity to avoid connection:

I do think that eventually, they came to reinforce a tendency I have to move toward books and abstraction, and at least indirectly, to move away from engagement with people and social engagement… over time I do think that they were part of this sort of tamping down of emotional, spiritual connection.”

Hillary is a 21-year-old college student in a creative arts therapy program. She talked about noticing the spiritually hindering effects of medication during the process of withdrawal:

“Taking medication as an adolescent really hampered my ability to feel spiritually connected… I was very shocked as I started getting off the psychiatric medications, how much spirituality, which had been very prominent for me as a young child, started to come back. I feel that it created a barrier between being able to experience feelings of being connected to a higher power, and to humanity as a whole, and just being able to feel like part of the universe… I think that particularly the last medication that was ever added for me, which was Risperidal, was extraordinarily deadening. It really, medications really decreased my ability to feel pleasure, really stifled my ability to connect with others.

Kelly was certain that the only way she had been able to feel what she called ‘God consciousness’ was by stopping her medication:

And that was the moment where, for the first time in my life, and I was completely off psychiatric medication, I’d been off for about a month. It was the first time in my life where I recognized the existence of a loving creator. Not just like an energy in the world, because I could always take on the idea of karma, or a balancing energy in the world. But I mean like a conscious power that was acting in my life… I don’t know if I could find that while I was on medication… I’m not sure how to explain how it works. I just know it was something I never found before. It wasn’t until I got off of it, that I felt it. I couldn’t feel it before.”

These passages show how some people are experiencing negative SSEs, which resulted in delays to recovery. Wellness was impeded by decreased feelings of connectedness to oneself, others, and the transcendent.

What can be made of the fact that each person had a different experience, and that in the journey toward recovery, the two groups managed to discover contradictory roads to the same destination? These findings are part of the push for a new paradigm which recognizes the diversity, complexity, and potential for harm of psychiatric medication use. My work in the area of spirituality builds on two key components in the shift toward more effective treatment practices: identification and recognition of the non-pharmacological correlates of medication use, and the primacy of individual variation in medication use. We are moving away from the dominant, one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical approach, and toward care that is more personalized and uniquely suited to the individual. This is necessary not simply on humanistic grounds, but because doing so improves treatment outcomes. For some people, more effective care may include an awareness of the medication/spirituality relationship.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

42 COMMENTS

  1. You know, I’ve worked almost seven years at a state “hospital”. In those seven years I’ve talked with hundreds of people about the effects of the damned drugs that they’re forced to take. I’ve never had one person tell me about how those drugs improve their spiritual life, about how they bring them closer to whatever the Divine is for them. In fact, they tell me exactly the opposite; these drugs make it very difficult for them to connect with God and the spiritual side of life. And if they do struggle to express their spiritual side they are accused of being hyper religious or showing excessive religiosity. Clinging onto their spirituality as their strength and source of support is diagnosed as a negative thing and goes down as such in their charts.

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    • And the more they struggle to hold onto their religion and spirituality the more they get drugged because their “religiosity” shows how they are deteriorating and just how sick and ill they truly are! It truly makes one wonder what world psychiatrists came from and where their damned heads are. When you live in the buckle of the Bible Belt everyone can be diagnosed as being hyper religious and expressing religiosity” that is excessive!

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    • Hi Stephen,

      I appreciate your comment because it points to what I found most surprising. When I started the project I presumed only that medication had been hindering to spirituality. The first person I interviewed told me the opposite, and I wasn’t prepared for it. thank you. Lynne

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  2. I just think that those who have never tried Psy chemicals cannot begin to appreciate the pain and suffering that they cause. I know because l am forced to take these substances since the age of 17. What possible spiritual good can be had from being tortured ? I’m 55 years old now, that’s à great deal of torture believe me! Please work towards lifting obligatory administering and focus on human rights, your ethical conscience is so far more important…

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  3. Lynne, your subject matter for study is ridiculous. Anyone who is using mood altering chemicals to function, is destroying their spirituality. And if these are prescription meds, the simple fact that they don’t tell of their doctor is enough to show that their spirituality has been destroyed.

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  4. Another good example for the non-material causes and non-effectiveness of poisons.
    But by limiting the definition of spirituality to “closeness to god or oneself”, the afflicted
    also limit themselves and the affliction from something greater than mere recovery.

    Keep up the good work! 🙂

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  5. Let me tell you, transdermal Ritalin prescribed in combination with oral Adderall, Prozac, and Ativan put me in touch with spirits and the universe itself. Being swat-teamed for strange but harmless, non-aggressive palaver with a bank manager rendered the whole multi-week period of bliss rather not worth it, but if it had ended without a terrifying encounter with the po-po, I’d recommend to anyone.

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  6. Lynne, if you are giving prescription medications to people in order to conduct experiments in ‘spirituality’, this may be unlawful.

    I am looking into this.

    Though I am not a big fan of any kind of licensing shrinks, if you are giving out prescription medications unlawfully, then I will press until federal law enforcement arrests you. I will go after your licensing, insurance, and your consulting office landlord, and your book publisher too.

    I have already put a group of 4 brothers pushing street drugs into our state prison, so I am not new to this kind of territory.

    Even if it cannot be established that you are now breaking any law, I will continue to monitor the situation.

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    • Yes, there are better ways.

      I know many who became psychic/spiritual after head injuries from car or motorcycle accidents. Know several who became psychic after near death experiences.

      In the words of the great orthomolecular psychiatrist Abram Hoffer: “How can something that makes well people sick, make sick people well?” He suggested that all bottles of pharmaceuticals carry a skull and crossbones symbol and the word POISON.

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  7. Lynne, let me try to understand you better. So you are actually giving people psychiatric medications in order to study their spiritual effects?

    Who is prescribing these medicines? Are you doing this? Is someone else doing this?

    You must realize that so long as people think they need chemicals to reach altered states of consciousness, then we are going to have a nation of children and adults addicted to prescription and street drugs, plus alcohol. And as long as people believe that seeking altered states of consciousness is the best way to deal with their experiences of injustice, then we will forever be a nation of tuned out zombies, unable to organize and fight for justice.

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    • Hi Jolly Roger,
      Sorry for any misunderstandings about how people were recruited to participate in my study. I contacted peer-led, peer supported groups asking for people who were interested in sharing their personal experiences with any medication/spiritual interactions. I also published a blog on MIA seeking volunteers. The goal of a qualitative study like mine is to understand how someone else is experiencing the world in regards to a particular topic. So I only asked people about experiences they had, I didn’t try to induce any particular experiences. Thank you for your comments and expanding the conversation.
      Lynne

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        • wow, what a flashback and flood.

          mental activity, gee. what ever shall we do? lol.

          “I do see the human energy field (and more).” reading that line was instant transport to my childhood. i distinctly remember consciously and willfully disconnecting from second vision. i found it very distracting. i now regret it and figure if i had just exerted a little discipline i could’ve developed necessary spiritual skills to better navigate, and protect, my life.

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          • Adam McLeod ND aka Dream Healer – look at his books – wrote or said somewhere that he would expand or shrink his energy field and babies would follow with their eyes what he was doing. We all have these abilities as children – they usually get suppressed or ridiculed or psychiatrized. Wishing you well.

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          • i don’t know if this is a universal abuse, i think it might be, but when i was a kid it was some sort of common knowledge that “telepathy isn’t real”.

            such liars. i have no idea what made people say that and no idea why it was such a common disbelief but a lifetime later i’ve met one of my telepathic connections face to face (and have all the evidence in the world to prove it). i look back on it now and know what all the denial was about (and it’s that very denial psychiatry capitalizes on).

            all by design, i suppose. but then i look to god with the blackest eyes. there’s only one thing blacker than the blackest evil soul and that is the blackness of a victim. victims like me don’t ever heal and that’s something the people of this world don’t want to acknowledge or admit.

            sometimes, catastrophic harm spells total condemnation. wicked losses, and eternity is a very very long time.

            tc, amnesia 😀

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          • yes, except for the fact that there are at least some of us who aren’t ignorant. it’s that whole “being awake in a world that is largely unconscious” nightmare. it’s very difficult trying to communicate and interact with people who are not on the same mental plane.

            it’s really not a matter of belief systems. i mean, to some degree it is but it’s a matter of belief systems when people are in DISbelief. otherwise, there are those of us who have knowledge AND the evidence and proof. however, in a world so heavily dominated by science people are painfully stuck at the “brain” level, as if all science is only ever in terms of DNA and brain.

            that’s so mentally stunted. there are vast branches of science that can be utilized to explain spirit (psychic) reality. easily.

            it comes down to a matter of will, and authority. for some reason, people really don’t embody LIBERTY.

            liberty is a self-directed act. in this world, most people will not act unless a law informs them or if an authority commands them or in some way gives them permission.

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  8. This topic is all too bizarre and amateurish.

    Psych drugs leave spaces in the human energy field. This allows undesirable energies to get in. People get worse. They are being made worse because the drugs damage the field. More drugs then follow, etc, etc, etc.

    And then when the field is very porous and the patient has been driven insane, they get rewarded with ECT which totally destroys many. The ones who suffer most are the ones who had expanded consciousness in the first place – the artists, the musicians, the writers, etc.

    ECT damage can be seen in the human energy field.

    Look at a photo of a preteen who took her own life. There is a space in this girl’s energy field that intersects with her forehead, her frontal lobes. This is the kind of trauma caused by drugs. She would not have been able to link consequences and her emotions, which would also have been very negatively affected. Prior to this, this little girl was joyful – she was just what they call a kinetic learner which means she had to learn through movement and “hands on” learning. She should never have been given drugs (to help her concentrate in school.

    I once attended a seminar for voice-hearers. I went because of the reputation of the presenters. Many of the attendees were psychically open and didn’t realize it. Their doctors, of course, didn’t realize it either and were drugging them. Wrong.

    The problem – consciousness isn’t taught in schools. I have a book in the works.

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  9. Had a Spiritual Awakening 7 years ago while under (a large dose of) a then-experimental type of Seroquel. Prior to that, been on descent after being diagnosed with a personality disorder and getting labelled with several disorders at once.
    Right after, realized it was Seroquel messing me up and withdrew about 80% in the 1st year (now 98,5% down). Studied Psychology as well to better manage myself and explored Mysticism.
    After suspecting for a while, found that in an MRI done for research showed showed the main morphology for Autism. When presented to my shrink,, promptly reassessed me from Schizo-Affective/Borderline (whatever that is) to Asperger’s/ASD and granted me permission to undergo Gender Transition (realized after my Awakening as well).
    On the Spiritual front, checked out a number of Churches (Pentecostal, Presbyterian), and some Sufi until becoming a Member of the United Church of Canada a bit under 2 years ago

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  10. i’d love to see people define and explain spirit and spirituality.

    i’m half shocked, half not to learn that nuns are indoctrinated in the antichrist’s world. they’re in for a world of horror when they learn the truth. it’s been over 5 years now since i first declared psychiatry to be an antichrist system. psychiatry’s biblical identity is an absolute and irrefutable truth. i was so pleased to read this article and know that the truth is finally starting to reach humanity,
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-illness-metaphor/201708/psychiatric-treatment-religious-experience

    telepathy
    prophecy
    precognition
    possession
    visions

    it’s all so very MENTAL but spirit is certainly not limited to the mind.

    i’d love to see people define and explain spirit and spirituality.

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    • it is spiritual but it’s adverse spirituality.

      three primary states of psyche: active (psychic), adverse (psychotic), dormant (inactive, flat).

      two features of so-called psychosis are hallucinations or delusions but those two things, hallucinations and delusions, are both highly debatable. in positive spirituality the same phenomena can be experienced but the vocabulary would be different. for example, in a positive spiritual experience a so-called hallucination might be called a vision or seeing with the third eye. they’re essentially the same exact experience but are experienced and expressed differently.

      for the record, it is 100% absolutely and entirely impossible to separate good and evil from spirituality. there is no spirituality that is devoid of good (god and angels; the light) and evil (satan and demons; the dark).

      setting the visuals aside, take a look at the auditory and inter-exchange of thought:

      holy communion is the religious word for communication with the divine (god and / or angels). that communication happens in the temple (temple is the master synonym for mind). the secular word for communication in the temple is telepathy. the antichrist’s word for communication in the temple is mental illness, psychosis, hallucination, delusion, schizophrenia.

      but it’s all the same thing.

      the mind sees and hears. those are basic, normal functions but an atheistic and secular society are content to twist normalcy into absurd.

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  11. In my experience, my cocktail blocked out the voice of God and opened my soul to demonic influence. Since coming off I have experienced a transformation of mind/heart like what AA describes. Thank God I’m not who I was on psych drugs! My conscience is no longer asleep.

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