I don’t get why he didn’t just claim that mystical experiences are *possible* with a healthy mind. That seems much more reasonable if I might not believe it personally. (Of course, it’s because it’s twitter, and everything you say has to be provocative and witty.)
I’ve never had a mystical experience, and I’m supposed to believe that therefore I am mentally unhealthy? Ridiculous.
Mystical is very loosely defined. I once had an out of body experience but I would still have said no. In fact even at the time it felt weird not mystical.
There’s something to be said for traumatic or difficult experiences bringing about the desire or necessity to “reach deeper” or outside of oneself more aggressively. Of course someone could make the argument that the mind falsely creates the sensation as a defense mechanism. Smarter men than I have debated these subjects forever but personally I feel that God or The Divine chooses to remain arguably nonexistent in order to give free will. But yeah people make bold tweets as some shotgun rejoinder and it feels snappy. Instant axioms of dubious value.
....hm. I wouldn't say I have mystical experiences but I would absolutely say I encounter the strange and the indescribably beautiful regularly (and, uh, surely most people do?). I guess the second is supposed to be an elaboration of the first but the two paragraphs in the tweet definitely read to me as making very different claims.
Did you give the one-question Narcissism test? Although I imagine Narcissists would be likely to over-report mystical experiences.
BTW the effect sizes you’re seeing is small enough that I wonder if the correct answer is really “no effect” (and the chi squared significance is driven by small shifts in other variables.) That’s quite lovely.
Thank you for running an actual test! It's always great to see people actually verifying stuff and doing statistics instead of making shit up.
IIRC, this is actually a well-replicated finding! Higher levels of spirituality and mysticism are usually associated with higher rates of mental illness (unlike traditional religiosity, where the correlation with mental illness is reversed). I know other studies in more representative samples (e.g. the GSS) have found pretty much the same thing.
I suspect the correlation here is somewhat weaker than the correlation in the general population, because of how nonrepresentative ACT readers are. If you have a nonrepresentative sample that selects on any of these axes (e.g. mental illness or spirituality), you'll usually get an attenuated correlation because you're conditioning on a collider. If mental illness was a prerequisite for signing up to ACT, for example, you'd see no correlation at all, because the rate would be 100% for both groups!
I have Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and have spiritual experiences all the time. It's not unhealthy, it's just different. I wish everyone would be themselves and stop trying to be like me.
There is nothing wise about that tweet; clinically nor contemplatively. Scott I think you might agree that current DSM definitions might view a whole variety of classic "mystical experiences" of not-self or "oneness" (two examples), as grandiose, narcissistic, psychotic, delusional etc. I won't elaborate as many have done so in very erudite ways. Suffice it to say, any public claim to the mystic, is immediately suspect. Awakened ones never say so and would never accord exclusivity to awakening. All human minds are capable of experiencing awe, wonder, clarity and compassionate regard. Healthy or not.
Possibly worth noting, I would probably answer the survey question with "No" (it would depend a bit on how I define "completely distinct from ordinary life" on the day I took the survey), but I would say I'm "encountering the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful" at least once a month.
How much of “mentally healthy” is socially constructed? Isn’t this question dependent on choosing a value system for comparing minds I order to determine which states are “healthy”?
The problem I have with this is the conflation of the spiritual with the mystical. I'm going to assume that this is due to the current tendency towards materialism in human neurobiology and a disposition towards seeing human consciousness entirely in terms of electro-chemical processes. The mind is real even though it is not physical. Ideas are identifiably responses to physical reality and have consequences in physical reality through the role they play in guiding our actions. This is reflected in our emotions and the role they play in our evaluations of our physical sensations. All of this is to say that you don't need to appeal to the supernatural or the mystical in explaining the spiritual. Human beings are capable of a far wider range of experiences that require no mystical or supernatural explanation than some are willing to give us credit for. If somebody's feeling better than you think they can, look for the reason in that person's own life rather than religion.
Odd, low-key humble brag posing as a "take." Since links have been shown between childhood trauma/adversity and potentially bipolar disorder and higher creativity, seems like it would be more likely to go the other way.
There are a bunch of reasons why the SSC survey wouldn’t reflect the population as a whole, but the one that most jumps out to me is that the respondents are 88% male.
I get that this is a pretty informal analysis and you’re not submitting this to Nature or anything, but I still feel like you should flag this as a huge caveat. As it stands, this feels a bit like Malcolm Gladwell taking an experiment performed on a dozen affluent college students, and interpreting the results as some deep statement about humanity as a whole.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
It does seem that the tweet is asserting that mental health includes having a healthily functioning mystical experience module.
But it also seems that "mystical experience" is being defined as things causing awe and wonderment, which seems like it might encompass a larger circle of experience than "spiritual connectedness/profundity/presence".
The original tweet you posted is a subjective definition of "mentally healthy". That makes sense as a phrase even if the overall claim.feels a bit bogus but kinda true.
But then you try to quantify it to study it. Doesn't make sense to me. This phrase cannot be defined precisely. What's the point in asking someone to rate (say) their happiness? You ask them on a different day they could come up with a 5/10 instead of 7/10. You simply cannot quantify something that you cannot define uniquely.
Have to say this makes me feel a bit better about mine. I don’t talk about it in real life as I didn’t have a great childhood and my mental health history isn’t great.
Didn’t believe in God before it, but then afterward I did. Not some guy who is arbitrarily capricious and lives on a cloud or whatever, but a force behind the universe.
Lots of semantic nitpicking is possible here. I consider my experience as mystical when I'm relaxed and not ruminating (mentally healthy state?). It's light, spacious and beautiful and if I lean into it, blissful. Happened today whine driving for example. I better go have another one now.
Edit:Am I mentally healthy? Depends.. I get anxious and do spend time ruminating until I catch myself. Also, caveat, I need to meditate relatively regularly in order to be able to access these states in my day today life. It gets much harder if I fall off the bandwagon.
It’s poor epistemic practice to use this level of confidence/certainty in your answer. You’re basing your answer on a survey that is highly unrepresentative of the general population and that has had no corrections applied to fix that issue, as far as I can tell.
I've had such experiences only while on drugs. It is tempting to think that the drugs allow you to perceive truths you wouldn't be able to perceive otherwise.
But the evolved nature of brains means that easy, trivial mental improvements are unlikely to exist - evolution picks up such dropped $100 bills (opportunities for easy improvements) sooner or later, until no more exist.
Just from that observation, it's pretty clear that drugs can only break a healthy mind in various perhaps-interesting ways, not make it work better. So any "truths" discovered via mind-altering drugs are unlikely to be true. (Drugs may be able to mitigate problems in unhealthy minds.)
Re any revelatory mystical experiences, see how many result in any verifiably true knowledge afterward. My experience is zero. (Doesn't mean it wasn't fun.)
I agree with Scott that the tweet is false as stated.
But I also think the tweet is an example of a rhetorically inflated claim for which there might be a more modest and precise version that is both true and significant.
It is a common feature of public discourse, especial on a forum like Twitter, that many people prefer a rhetorically inflated version of a claim, thinking that it "makes the point" more strongly. My view is that such inflated versions are just easier to defeat and then dismiss, as Scott has done, while leaving the underlying issue untouched.
A more modest version of the claim might be "Among the mentally healthy, mystical experiences are not rare."
There’s no basis on which to posit that opinion. I hate when people generalize their own experience. I wonder how mentally healthy a person that feels compelled to relay to the world that they’re mentally healthy as opposed to others can be.
There’s some cultural evidence it’s an inaccurate tweet as well. Has this person never heard of a “dark night of the soul”? Here’s my theory, based on experience:
It comes on most often at the extremities. I’m not talking about a numinous moment or anything; I mean a bonafide experience. Whether you’re really ecstatic or really depressed, you’re vulnerable enough to see beyond out at the distant peripheries of emotion & awareness.
As others have pointed out there may be some validity issues here with either Scott's survey or whatever instrument generated the data that inspired the Tweet above. However, putting that aside, one pretty obvious confounding variable here is whether or not people where high when they had the experience.
I don't think I've ever had anything that approximates a mystical experience, EXCEPT a few times in my younger days when I was dosed on blotter acid. And it's hard to know how that variable (high on, say, LSD, or MDMA, or whatever that drug is that they drink in South America and makes you throw up (William Burroughs called it Yage, I think it goes by another name now), etc) interacts with the 'healthy mind' variable.
Yes since I am the mystical kind, in a way built my life around the sense of mystical encounter, and credit it with my recovery from a difficult time when I was young and for helping me to recover from my mental health problems and be able to hold together marriage and raise children, sample size of one obviously. So how about separating out 'before' problems such as childhood and family history from current level of distress? Do people who have had mystical encounters tend to show improvement on their mental health metrics since that encounter? If anything perhaps people who've had difficult circumstances might be more likely to want or need to seek out the mystical.
Instrumentalizing "mystical experiences happen when the mind is healthy" is by itself challenging. The interpretations of it go on endlessly, given that a mystic in a non-mystical society is unlikely to feel healthy, but allowing social pressure to dictate intrinsic mental markers of wellness would seemingly defeat the point.
Using the SSC dataset is unlikely to help. You have a population that skews high-IQ, high-education, non-religious. In a social setting where religiosity is unpopular, mystical experience would likely be socially undesirable. A healthy person *should* suppress any tendency towards a mystical experience, both in terms of rewriting memory, and in terms of suppressing the tendency going forward.
(Also, I would bet that SSC members self-select to tend to score low on tests like Absorption relative to the base population. A population that focuses on intellectual detachment from their ideas, is very to select against people who hear God whisper from the clouds.)
That being said, I agree with your conclusion. I just don't think we can reliably de-bias the potential intrinsic biases in your sampling. Ironically, I think in order to trust the SSC dataset, we'd need to prove the claim with a different dataset, and thereby negate the value of using the SSC dataset.
How about a survey of happiness based on youthful head injuries? All the skaters I knew that didn’t go too druggy seem pretty well adjusted. My theory is we simply don’t remember all the ways we were aggrieved in Junior High to carry that emotional baggage as adults.
The original tweet feels more prescriptive, (probably based on the writer's personal experience & intuition), than an attempt at an honest observation of the world based on careful analysis. So I feel like their response to you, even if they accepted your poll as validly scientific, would be "Who cares whether people think they are mentally healthy? If they aren't having mystical experiences, then they are not."
If the Dark Night of the Soul is a thing, your "no personal history of anxiety or depression" criterion is going to run into it.
Anyhoo, isn't this originating in Maslow's "peak experiences", and him (I think) writing that it seemed to be a thing happening the most to healthy people?
Not to say I disagree, but I never trust people that self report as mentally healthy. It's very easy to repress yourself, and then outwardly you look mostly fine, inwardly you think you feel fine, but you're not really. I know people that display symptoms of anxiety and depression, but they self report as mentally healthy and get defensive when pressed. A tenuous grasp on a belief.
Unless you have a very special kind of mind, mystical experiences are few and far between. It's not surprising most people haven't had them. I'd be interested in seeing how this stat changes with age; have older people had mystical experiences more than younger people?
The real question is whether the people taking the survey (or those who made it or who try to interpret the results) have any idea what a "mystical" or "religious" experience is, or how it differs from mental illness, or whether they're even using a consistent definition. I would guess the answer, for the most part, is "no", which means the data set is basically meaningless.
I am an atheist, but once when I was in a church in London looking at mural of Joan of Arc, I had this feeling that it somehow made more sense to believe that she (and by extension the other saints, and God) still existed and was aware of me, than to believe that it isn't so. Somehow that it makes more sense to believe that everything is preserved rather than passing away. I wonder whether this is a "spiritual experience". I didn't have an altered state of consciousness or anything. Nor was I filled with conviction, and it didn't feel that disconnected from normal life, even though it was unusual. I felt for a while that it was possible to see things from a different perspective than my usual one.
"Mystical experiences naturally occur" seems like the sort of thing you can only say if you don't think mystical experiences are objectively meaningful, or you're defining them so broadly that they might as well be meaningless. It smacks of therapeutic deism. What is the purpose of these experiences? What do you learn from them? What do they do to you?
We know that drugs, for example, can consistently induce the feeling of meaningfulness or transcendence. I don't think this disproves the existence of something transcendent - any more than artificially inducing a phantom smell of smoke would disprove fire - but it should raise your bar for assuming that any perceived encounter with the numinous is worth anything.
(Cards on the table: I'm a fundie and that's why this stuff raises my hackles.)
Psychologist here: Big sweeping generalizations like the tweeter’s almost never turn out to be more than a little true. At most you’ll find a weak relationship between the traits at issue. People’s traits aren’t organized into columns, so to speak — with traits in the same column showing high correlations among pairs of them. Traits aren’t even organized into grids, with traits in the same square correlated. In fact, the whole idea of traits is kind of suspect. Everyone realizes this when they take some questionnaire that asks questions like, “Are you bold or timid?” “Well,” you think, “I’m bold in some situations and timid in others,” and that variability of characteristic behavior across situations is the norm. That’s why we all know people who are deeply wise and clever in their work but foolish in love relationships, people with hyperconventional homes and habits who are Burning Mfan fanatics, martial arts monsters who are passionate about growing African violets, etc. In fact, I think it may be that when somebody tends to act a certain way in all situations, that’s a sign of something amiss. Say somebody has high standards for themselves at their work and then when you introduce them to square dancing you see the same high standards kick in — their struggle fiercely to free themselves of typical novice mistakes — you might feel like something’s amiss? It’s just square dancing, for heaven’s sake, relax — right? It’s adaptive to have a different mind set in different situations, and when somebody doesn’t the lack of flexibility comes across as a bit unhealthy. So all this makes me doubt that a certain *kind* of person has mystical experiences. There are probably many paths to having them.
I am definitely subject to the oceanic experience Scott asked about. My teens and 20’s were the peak years for having it, but now in later years it still visits me from time to time. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt. I usually feel a wave of goosebumps when I have it, and often shed tears as well. So I’m trying to figure out why I’m subject to it. I expect some of it is wiring, but a kind of wiring that’s unrelated to mental health of illness — just a wiring for intensity. My father was an artist, and used to shake his head in frustration when he tried to convey how much he loved certain painters’ work — “they’re just . . . they’re just . . .wonderful,” he’d say. I think he was subject to a sort of visual ecstasy. And I was an only child, and used to entertaining myself and walking around thinking my own thoughts, and therefore maybe more likely to stumble into a moment when I looked at the sky and thought “space extends forever in every direction, and here’s this bush right here, and me looking at it all, it doesn’t mean a thing and here we all are.” And that thought sounds sort of bleak, maybe, but in fact was accompanied by a shiver of indescribable delight. Yum.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”
Well.....
I wouldn't think 1/8th of people are extremely mentally healthy any more then I think 1/8 people are professional athlete levels of strength training with ability to run a mile in a few minutes or lift their body weight. Pre-corona helps but, I think it would be rose tainted for people to say that 2020 society was going well.
This may offend someone formally trained in physiology but the perception in 4chan related community's is that autism and schizo is a spectrum and there plenty of reason to expect that a autism biased sample may have less schizo related experience. And "ssc" while probably not as bad a sample as lesswrong and looking at the data its biased towards autism and atheists.
If your in a hard line atheist community where people would react negatively to having a mystical experience it seems likely to me that a) people would downplay it b) feel shame and rate their mental health as 1 less then the max even if they are otherwise doing great
Your spirituality question specifies an "extreme" experience, the tweet is about routine experience. I think (common) meditation would never qualify for the first, but could easy qualify for the 2nd.
etc. etc. I think that take plenty defensible, and think a specific survey for the general public is done before calling it false. (altho Id probably specifically include mediation as a spiritual experience)
I think there's probably some selection bias here.
In the general population, religiosity may be correlated both with better mental health (due to sense of community, sense that God is looking out for you, etc.) and greater tendency towards spiritual experiences (due to greater tendency to attribute things to God), which would explain the tweet.
ACT readers are more likely to want to analyze all of their experiences logically in great detail (I think this is the one underlying theme in this community), regardless of religious affiliation. Conditioned on this, relatively few people will find conclusive evidence of mystical experiences, regardless of their mental health.
Anecdatapoint: I would regard myself as fairly mentally healthy, modulo some occasional intrusive thoughts. One time I had a experience that seems possibly in the same category, depending on how we're defining "mystical". I had just gotten back from lunch (cheeseburger and a soda, no alcohol or any other psychoactive substances consumed) and an extremely strong feeling of peace, calm, and contentment suddenly came over me. I probably sat in the parking garage for five minutes just blissed out on it before going inside, and it continued for probably another 20 or 30 minutes. Eventually it mostly subsided, but my mood stayed a bit elevated for the rest of the day.
I'm guessing it was just some chance fluke of biochemistry, but I'd never felt anything like that before or since, and until that point the day had been otherwise unremarkable. I could definitely imagine someone with a more spiritual mindset than I do having a comparable experience and interpreting it in a mystical way.
Seems to me your definition of "mentally healthy" could use some interrogation/explanation. For example, why are no family history or even personal history of depression inclusion/exclusion criteria?
Imagine making this tweet from the perspective of someone who frequently has mystical experiences: if those experiences stopped, you’d feel like you were missing out on something fundamental—something obviously went wrong. You conclude that people who don’t have these experiences probably also have something wrong. Is your generalization ad-hoc or just narrow-minded?
You see the results of the survey. You look at the criteria for “very mentally healthy” and object that it’s too narrow. A person with schizoid personality disorder, or a narcissist, or a psychopath could meet those criteria—something’s missing. Maybe spiritual receptiveness is also missing.
"So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”. "
Well, yeah: this tweet sounds just like one of those "spiritual, not religious, eat pray love, live laugh love, I do yoga and mindfulness, life is such a beautiful gift (when you're well-off, healthy, and have only First World Problems), amn't I so special unlike those vulgar earth-bound moles who don't have numinous experiences every five minutes?"
It does very much depend on your definition of "mystical", but to be frank, it reminds me of the entire wellness, self-help, Chicken Soup for your budgie, industry. Go out on your deck at dawn with your cup of artisan coffee and take a deep breath as you marvel at the beauty around you before you start your day's work as an influencer or whatever.
The world is beautiful and wonderful. but you don't have to make a production out of it, Saskia.
(This is also why I can never make any headway with those mental health therapy-lite self-help books, they're full of crap like this: "if we were truly healthy and grounded and aware of our connection to the cosmos as stardust beings, we'd be having mystic crystal revelations all the time").
I feel like the answers from the survey you used are to a question that is phrased rather significantly differently from what you were inquiring about, _and_ that the tweet phrases it rather differently than the thing I suspect they're actually talking about. So... Not surprised by the result but I don't think anything was learned here.
I suppose it depends on how good you are at describing beauty. Or, more sensibly, that it's not clear whether a mystical exprience is best defined as a quale or as reaction to a quale.
"The whole secret of life lies in the discovery of this Tao which can never be discovered. This does not involve an intellectual quest, but rather a spiritual change of one's whole being."
--Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
[This book contrasts and compares selected categories of mystics and on this point they agree (to the extent I understand what I'm reading!)]
As a child of the 1960s I have along-term interest in mystical experience. As a musician I have a particular interest in mystical experience induced by music. Here's an experience I had back in the ancient days:
During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion” – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn’t make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.
That was a powerful experience. It "haunted" me for years.
That’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memories faded & the ambivalence too. I’m playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.
I think there's a massive difference between encountering something "strange" or "beautiful", and having a mystical experience. For example, I have personally encountered fields of wildflowers that left me almost totally incoherent with their beauty ("they should've sent a poet !"). However, they were not supernatural objects. There was no fairy glamour involved, just biological organisms doing what they do. Other people could see the same flowers. So could bees and other insects. An object does not need to be mystically supernatural in order to be beautiful; in fact, I'd argue that real things are often more beautiful than anything we can imagine.
Half-baked take: effective mysticism improves and maintains your life. Effective mystical experiences lead toward having a healthy mind. Therefore, while not strictly speaking "false", the claim is causally misleading.
Mystical experiences are often associated with the mentally ill -- for good reason.
But *maybe* the exceptionally healthy can also experience more mystical experiences than healthy normies.
Once upon a time, I followed a mostly raw instinctive eating diet. My dreams were brighter on the diet, and I could achieve certain meditative bliss states with little effort. I suspect that my experience was similar to those who go on long fasts. In both cases the body gets to get rid of troublesome molecular fragments generated by cooking.
But eating mostly raw/unmixed/by instinct had similar downsides as long fasting: weight loss, social isolation, and assorted cravings. So I quit after a time.
Based upon my experience, I believe thati it is possible to be healthier than normal and experience some interesting mystical bliss out states. But it is not easy! The foods on our grocery store shelves were selected more for ease of growing and storage, vs. edibility in a raw natural state. And maybe the foods which sustained humans before we adopted cooking are now extinct. So maybe it is only possible to achieve the states I experienced temporarily -- then the need for Real Food beats out the beauties of Bliss.
I think the issue is as much “mystical experience” as “mentally healthy”.
I consider myself mentally healthy, and consider that I have these sorts of experiences (numinous, indescribably beautiful); I just don’t see any reason to wrap them in woo and call them “mystical”, and I expect I’m not alone in this.
One obvious way to square the circle is that it is perfectly plausible for a guy to be struck numb by and stand in awe before some vast natural wonder, then months later take the survey and answer the question “no” because he thinks of saints and gurus and religious fanatics and so on when he thinks about “spiritual” events.
If you asked child-me, that definetely was a profound and blissful experience, though not distinct from normal life - after all it was and absolutely normal thing to do. Back then I'd classify myself as very mental healthy based on these criterias.
Now I figured out that it wasn't God - just my own brain and that I'm autistic. Putting myself in the God-communicating-stance isn't profound anymore, though it can be somewhat pleasant. Not sure how to count this as evidence in favour or agaist the hypothesis.
I'll try to save something the original claim by making a much less general one: I think people that feel wonder and awe at their place in the universe tend to be more fulfilled and happy people, and vice versa. I don't have data but it feels right when I think about people I know, as well as my own ups and downs.
I think you can be mentally 'healthy' without being fulfilled and happy, in the "nothing explicitly wrong with you" kind of way that Scott's data captures, but it's a "ships in harbour are safe" kind of health that I don't think is in the spirit of the tweet.
I also think wonder and awe are better descriptors for the thing the tweeter is getting at – if I stand on a mountaintop and look out at a view that takes my breath away and take a few minutes to just marvel at it all, I don't _really_ consider myself to have had a mystical experience, but I would have done back when I was religious. The mental state is the same though in either case, so I think the more directly descriptive language is better than talking about "mystical experiences" and bringing in all that baggage.
And yeah maybe this all waters down something obviously false to something vacuously true, but we shouldn't be surprised that it all adds up to reality.
I don't think his claim is true, but I also don't think you chose the right measure. I think, in fact, the measure you chose is probably anti correlated? Specifically, you're largely measuring whether people have had an easy time in life in addition to reporting that they are currently having a good time, but it seems to me that like ~everything else with humans, we get good in domains where we've had some resistance, but not too much. Ie. practice within some zone of proximal development. Life is hard sometimes, and to maintain mental health it's important you have some practice maintaining that health against resistance.
I'm not saying it's necessary to go through a hard time in order to be healthy, but I also think going through a medium-hard time in the past is probably correlated with mental health, not anti correlated.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusion, because I think your analysis is bad and I declare a mistrial.
1) Your defined categories don't align with what the tweet is saying
> Someone qualified as very mentally healthy if they said they had no personal or family history of depression, anxiety, or autism, rated their average mood and life satisfaction as 7/10 or higher, and rated their childhood at least 7/10 on a scale from very bad to very good. Of about 8000 respondents, only about 1000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”.
You are characterizing a person as healthy or not and this is not equivalent to a healthy state of mind. A person is not their state of mind. It is common for people's minds to occupy healthy and unhealthy states.
I'll also note, I would have to respond as "not healthy" since I have a severe trauma history... but I would describe myself as mentally health as a result of all the work I have done. 1-1 and Group Therapy (Modalities include: CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, Art, Music), somatic experiencing and breath work, acupuncture, PT, long distance running and swimming, meditation and mindfulness, spiritual practices, more time outside, emotional support dog, improving sleep and diet habits... I could go on.
2) Sample Bias
It was a SSC Survey. It is important to note that this community is full of thinkers. I would posit that this community will have less spiritual experiences than a more representative sample of the overall human population, regardless of how they self-assess
3) Inability to evaluate respondent understanding of the survey and self-assessment
i.e. What does a "spiritual experience" and the definition you provided mean to someone else?
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
And here, you share your result while dismissing other interpretations of the tweet as "hokey ad hoc". To me the other errors and complications are understandable, but this conclusion feels callous and close minded to me. It is an interesting idea and I would love to explore it more.
I am mentally healthy modulo some ADHD, and am prone to a lot of mystical experiences (I mean, in the class usually called 'mystical'; I don't endorse supernatural explanations). They're much more common when I push myself to extremes of one sort or another, such that my body is already in an altered state. Like, one of the more dramatic recent ones was after three days backpacking in the desert, I got a persistent hallucination of an angry face in the middle of my field of view. It was soundless but expressive, with lots of glowing tentacles writhing in a network overlaid across my normal vision. It came with a powerful sense of dread, and lasted for hours.
This is pretty typical- physical sustained extremes involving exposure and probably dehydration, absence of normal stimulus like phones or computer screens, and experiences displaying a mix of sensory hallucination and intense affective disruptions with a particular focus on facial and anthropomorphic pareidolia. I and my immediate family are also, as it happens, really prone to visual snow and tinnitus, so this happens in parallel with a brain that seems to have a lot of 'noise' between the perceptive and interpretive layers- and meditation can also be really intense for me, if less 'narrative'. To my knowledge, we don't have a history of schizophrenia or anything though.
So my general feeling as that mystical experiences have less to do with mental health in the traditional sense and more about what your brain does in response to getting whacked real hard- neurological crisis response for the weirdest 1-2% of times. Having spent a fair amount of time in the desert, I'm not at all surprised that so many major world religions seem to originate in them.
Wow, Scott, usually you're very good at steel-manning others' positions—but, just as your "Cheat Sheet For Reading Popular Media Articles About Psychiatry" was an outlier in terms of intellectual rigor, so too does this post come short of the rigor I usually expect from your posts:
Of course, you're perfectly free to define the artificial category of "very mentally healthy" however you want; however, that doesn't mean that others have to accept that definition. First, I question the rigor of relying on what people "say" their history is. What if a person has a "history of autism" purely because their parents interpreted their anti-authoritarian instincts as "mental illness" and fed one-sided, biased information to a psychiatrist? Why do some people's biases of normative behavior constitute a "history" of a lack of "mental health" on another person's part? Why is someone's reporting anxiety and depression considered a lack of "mental health," rather than merely evidence of the inherent tragedy and difficulty of human existence? (I note that, conveniently, you've defined "mental health," or, rather, a lack thereof, in such a way as to promote your own financial interest as a psychiatrist; obviously, if you chose a definition of "mental health" in a way that included more people, that would mean a smaller clientele of the "mentally ill," and that wouldn't be very good for business, now, would it?)
But, more importantly, you so self-assuredly declared that you're right, and that anyone who disagrees with you is using a "hokey ad hoc definition of 'the mind is healthy'"—while completely oblivious to the fact that you yourself just made up just such a definition (calling it by the name "artificial').
I answered positive to that question. Probably 1975, I was 14, fishing for salmon on the American River in Sacramento. At the upstream end of a small island, an a very strange feeling came over me ; kinda like the feeling after you've been hit in the head or shocked by electricity, that whole universe is buzzing feeling. Dragging my spinner through the water trying to attract a salmon, I snagged on something. Tightened the drag, and pulled, hoping to break free. The buzzing got more intense. The lure broke free, and came back with a piece of someone's shirt. Done with that stuff, I bugged out.
Fast forward to about 1990, I trained as an EMT. Part of the training is a day ride along in an ambulance. Our second call was a 'difficulty breathing' call. Just as we rolled up, that buzzing feeling came over me again. Yes that patient had died.
Later I described this feeling to a cop, who told me he has felt the same thing when coming to the scene of a death.
You might be high-balling this - I can't remember which years I took the survey, but I'd have fallen in the mentally healthy category and have had mystical experiences. However, psychadelics were a factor; it wasn't a random occurrence.
Mostly a reply to various people, but I think the standard definition of "mentally healthy" has to be "wouldn't be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition/disorder." You could certainly argue that some forms of what are called mental illness are *actually healthier* than what psychiatry is aiming for, but it's fair enough to describe that as a hokey definition because it's distinctly non-standard.
I think this is like the imagination debate - if you're healthy and prone to mystical experiences, they're obviously normal and normative; if you're not, they're obviously a symptom of something.
1. I don't think that measuring "very mentally healthy"-ness thorugh self-reporting is super reliable.
2. I think that running this particular study in this particular community gives rise to some serious selection bias.
I expect the first effect to be statistically significant but not super strong and I expect the second effect to be so strong that we shouldn't really draw any conclusions from this survey.
Obviously the originator of that comment never read any Russian Literature. It's known, no philosophers come from warm weather. In other words you need some contrasting experiences in life that are certain to have an impact on a 7/10 score of happiness, in order to truly feel the mystical. I'm sure my college self wouldn't agree, and would say, oh no, that contrived experience by the lake was extremely mystical, but life and middle age certainly teaches us something else about what this is all about
Without knowing who made the tweet I would just think it was a bit of wu wu hyperbole. I know people that talk in a these terms and I always smile and shrug and say “Good for you!”
What an upsettingly offensive tweet to read with my morning coffee. I hate being reminded these people exist; it's exactly why I stay off Twitter. It seems intended to position the author as all-knowing and to provoke the next question: Tell me, your holiness, was my experience truly mystical up to your standards? Or am I sick and how should I get well?
Here's a controversial mental health take of my own: The assertion that other people must be mentally unhealthy if they don't have "mystical" experiences (a linguistic construct denoting, by design, an undefinable and unverifiable state but, it's implied, one which only the author's godlike judgment can easily discern, validate or reject) is the type of assertion that only a truly predatory narcissist could make. It's also an example of how social media has become a primary vector for mental illness, with cunningly injected appeals to FOMO and pseudo-scientific argle-bargle as its handmaidens.
"Mystical experiences" have throughout history been associated with madness. The tendency to elevate some unverifiable and subjective internal experience to "health" and thence to holiness has operated like a parasitic infection hopping from one human host to another for millennia; it survives because its victims, stripped of reason, gain power as a self-reinforcing collective. All religion boils down to this. But the average madman muttering on a street corner who believes his madness is the highest truth had not, until recently, infinite ink, paper and the means of distribution by which to infect millions of other potentially unstable people with his worldview. It only ever took one really slick psycho to start a cult, but now technology seems to have bred millions of them. The ancient parasite is out-competing itself, evolving and trying new tactics before our very eyes.
I'm so glad Scott ran an actual fact check. There couldn't be a better rebuttal.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
Reminder that you're basing this on your audience, in which there could be a vast number of uncorrelated precursors. It might better be thought of "This tweet is false for the type of individual who would complete my 2020 SSC survey." You then have to ask if the average participate in your survey is representative of society's population as a whole.
You showed that lack of mental health is a factor in having mystical experiences. You did not show that being mentally healthy makes it implausible someone would have a mythical experience. Neither did you show that it is implausible for someone who lacks mental health to not have mystical experiences. So both the mentally healthy and mentally unhealthy may or may not have mystical experiences, but the relationship between mental health and mystical experiences is statistically significant.
Mysticism is the belief that knowledge can be obtained without effort, i.e. through prayer, revelation, instinct, LSD, meditation, etc. Thus, while I'm sure that a mentally healthy person could have a mystical experience, it seems to me that too many such experiences would eventually threaten your mental health through bad epistemology.
I don’t get why he didn’t just claim that mystical experiences are *possible* with a healthy mind. That seems much more reasonable if I might not believe it personally. (Of course, it’s because it’s twitter, and everything you say has to be provocative and witty.)
I’ve never had a mystical experience, and I’m supposed to believe that therefore I am mentally unhealthy? Ridiculous.
Valuable information. Thank you for this insight. I will undoubtedly recall this later in life, perhaps tomorrow.
Headline, "Do All Healthy People Have Mystical Experiences?" does not match topic content, "mentally healthy." Right?
Mystical is very loosely defined. I once had an out of body experience but I would still have said no. In fact even at the time it felt weird not mystical.
There’s something to be said for traumatic or difficult experiences bringing about the desire or necessity to “reach deeper” or outside of oneself more aggressively. Of course someone could make the argument that the mind falsely creates the sensation as a defense mechanism. Smarter men than I have debated these subjects forever but personally I feel that God or The Divine chooses to remain arguably nonexistent in order to give free will. But yeah people make bold tweets as some shotgun rejoinder and it feels snappy. Instant axioms of dubious value.
....hm. I wouldn't say I have mystical experiences but I would absolutely say I encounter the strange and the indescribably beautiful regularly (and, uh, surely most people do?). I guess the second is supposed to be an elaboration of the first but the two paragraphs in the tweet definitely read to me as making very different claims.
Did you give the one-question Narcissism test? Although I imagine Narcissists would be likely to over-report mystical experiences.
BTW the effect sizes you’re seeing is small enough that I wonder if the correct answer is really “no effect” (and the chi squared significance is driven by small shifts in other variables.) That’s quite lovely.
Thank you for running an actual test! It's always great to see people actually verifying stuff and doing statistics instead of making shit up.
IIRC, this is actually a well-replicated finding! Higher levels of spirituality and mysticism are usually associated with higher rates of mental illness (unlike traditional religiosity, where the correlation with mental illness is reversed). I know other studies in more representative samples (e.g. the GSS) have found pretty much the same thing.
I suspect the correlation here is somewhat weaker than the correlation in the general population, because of how nonrepresentative ACT readers are. If you have a nonrepresentative sample that selects on any of these axes (e.g. mental illness or spirituality), you'll usually get an attenuated correlation because you're conditioning on a collider. If mental illness was a prerequisite for signing up to ACT, for example, you'd see no correlation at all, because the rate would be 100% for both groups!
I have Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and have spiritual experiences all the time. It's not unhealthy, it's just different. I wish everyone would be themselves and stop trying to be like me.
I'm surprised that as much as 1/8 of people match your rather stringent definition of healthy.
I guess I need to see a shrink, then. For that matter, it seems that most other cats aren't too healthy, either.
There is nothing wise about that tweet; clinically nor contemplatively. Scott I think you might agree that current DSM definitions might view a whole variety of classic "mystical experiences" of not-self or "oneness" (two examples), as grandiose, narcissistic, psychotic, delusional etc. I won't elaborate as many have done so in very erudite ways. Suffice it to say, any public claim to the mystic, is immediately suspect. Awakened ones never say so and would never accord exclusivity to awakening. All human minds are capable of experiencing awe, wonder, clarity and compassionate regard. Healthy or not.
Possibly worth noting, I would probably answer the survey question with "No" (it would depend a bit on how I define "completely distinct from ordinary life" on the day I took the survey), but I would say I'm "encountering the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful" at least once a month.
Are atheists less likely to have spiritual experiences? Are atheists vastly overrepresented in the annual survey?
I am probably one of 1000 who qualified, and I think I answered "unclear." If I were more religious, I would have probably answered "yes."
How much of “mentally healthy” is socially constructed? Isn’t this question dependent on choosing a value system for comparing minds I order to determine which states are “healthy”?
The problem I have with this is the conflation of the spiritual with the mystical. I'm going to assume that this is due to the current tendency towards materialism in human neurobiology and a disposition towards seeing human consciousness entirely in terms of electro-chemical processes. The mind is real even though it is not physical. Ideas are identifiably responses to physical reality and have consequences in physical reality through the role they play in guiding our actions. This is reflected in our emotions and the role they play in our evaluations of our physical sensations. All of this is to say that you don't need to appeal to the supernatural or the mystical in explaining the spiritual. Human beings are capable of a far wider range of experiences that require no mystical or supernatural explanation than some are willing to give us credit for. If somebody's feeling better than you think they can, look for the reason in that person's own life rather than religion.
Odd, low-key humble brag posing as a "take." Since links have been shown between childhood trauma/adversity and potentially bipolar disorder and higher creativity, seems like it would be more likely to go the other way.
There are a bunch of reasons why the SSC survey wouldn’t reflect the population as a whole, but the one that most jumps out to me is that the respondents are 88% male.
I get that this is a pretty informal analysis and you’re not submitting this to Nature or anything, but I still feel like you should flag this as a huge caveat. As it stands, this feels a bit like Malcolm Gladwell taking an experiment performed on a dozen affluent college students, and interpreting the results as some deep statement about humanity as a whole.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
It does seem that the tweet is asserting that mental health includes having a healthily functioning mystical experience module.
But it also seems that "mystical experience" is being defined as things causing awe and wonderment, which seems like it might encompass a larger circle of experience than "spiritual connectedness/profundity/presence".
The original tweet you posted is a subjective definition of "mentally healthy". That makes sense as a phrase even if the overall claim.feels a bit bogus but kinda true.
But then you try to quantify it to study it. Doesn't make sense to me. This phrase cannot be defined precisely. What's the point in asking someone to rate (say) their happiness? You ask them on a different day they could come up with a 5/10 instead of 7/10. You simply cannot quantify something that you cannot define uniquely.
Not every question can be studied scientifically.
Have to say this makes me feel a bit better about mine. I don’t talk about it in real life as I didn’t have a great childhood and my mental health history isn’t great.
Didn’t believe in God before it, but then afterward I did. Not some guy who is arbitrarily capricious and lives on a cloud or whatever, but a force behind the universe.
Lots of semantic nitpicking is possible here. I consider my experience as mystical when I'm relaxed and not ruminating (mentally healthy state?). It's light, spacious and beautiful and if I lean into it, blissful. Happened today whine driving for example. I better go have another one now.
Edit:Am I mentally healthy? Depends.. I get anxious and do spend time ruminating until I catch myself. Also, caveat, I need to meditate relatively regularly in order to be able to access these states in my day today life. It gets much harder if I fall off the bandwagon.
It’s poor epistemic practice to use this level of confidence/certainty in your answer. You’re basing your answer on a survey that is highly unrepresentative of the general population and that has had no corrections applied to fix that issue, as far as I can tell.
I've had such experiences only while on drugs. It is tempting to think that the drugs allow you to perceive truths you wouldn't be able to perceive otherwise.
But the evolved nature of brains means that easy, trivial mental improvements are unlikely to exist - evolution picks up such dropped $100 bills (opportunities for easy improvements) sooner or later, until no more exist.
Just from that observation, it's pretty clear that drugs can only break a healthy mind in various perhaps-interesting ways, not make it work better. So any "truths" discovered via mind-altering drugs are unlikely to be true. (Drugs may be able to mitigate problems in unhealthy minds.)
Re any revelatory mystical experiences, see how many result in any verifiably true knowledge afterward. My experience is zero. (Doesn't mean it wasn't fun.)
n=1
I agree with Scott that the tweet is false as stated.
But I also think the tweet is an example of a rhetorically inflated claim for which there might be a more modest and precise version that is both true and significant.
It is a common feature of public discourse, especial on a forum like Twitter, that many people prefer a rhetorically inflated version of a claim, thinking that it "makes the point" more strongly. My view is that such inflated versions are just easier to defeat and then dismiss, as Scott has done, while leaving the underlying issue untouched.
A more modest version of the claim might be "Among the mentally healthy, mystical experiences are not rare."
There’s no basis on which to posit that opinion. I hate when people generalize their own experience. I wonder how mentally healthy a person that feels compelled to relay to the world that they’re mentally healthy as opposed to others can be.
There’s some cultural evidence it’s an inaccurate tweet as well. Has this person never heard of a “dark night of the soul”? Here’s my theory, based on experience:
It comes on most often at the extremities. I’m not talking about a numinous moment or anything; I mean a bonafide experience. Whether you’re really ecstatic or really depressed, you’re vulnerable enough to see beyond out at the distant peripheries of emotion & awareness.
As others have pointed out there may be some validity issues here with either Scott's survey or whatever instrument generated the data that inspired the Tweet above. However, putting that aside, one pretty obvious confounding variable here is whether or not people where high when they had the experience.
I don't think I've ever had anything that approximates a mystical experience, EXCEPT a few times in my younger days when I was dosed on blotter acid. And it's hard to know how that variable (high on, say, LSD, or MDMA, or whatever that drug is that they drink in South America and makes you throw up (William Burroughs called it Yage, I think it goes by another name now), etc) interacts with the 'healthy mind' variable.
Yes since I am the mystical kind, in a way built my life around the sense of mystical encounter, and credit it with my recovery from a difficult time when I was young and for helping me to recover from my mental health problems and be able to hold together marriage and raise children, sample size of one obviously. So how about separating out 'before' problems such as childhood and family history from current level of distress? Do people who have had mystical encounters tend to show improvement on their mental health metrics since that encounter? If anything perhaps people who've had difficult circumstances might be more likely to want or need to seek out the mystical.
Instrumentalizing "mystical experiences happen when the mind is healthy" is by itself challenging. The interpretations of it go on endlessly, given that a mystic in a non-mystical society is unlikely to feel healthy, but allowing social pressure to dictate intrinsic mental markers of wellness would seemingly defeat the point.
Using the SSC dataset is unlikely to help. You have a population that skews high-IQ, high-education, non-religious. In a social setting where religiosity is unpopular, mystical experience would likely be socially undesirable. A healthy person *should* suppress any tendency towards a mystical experience, both in terms of rewriting memory, and in terms of suppressing the tendency going forward.
(Also, I would bet that SSC members self-select to tend to score low on tests like Absorption relative to the base population. A population that focuses on intellectual detachment from their ideas, is very to select against people who hear God whisper from the clouds.)
That being said, I agree with your conclusion. I just don't think we can reliably de-bias the potential intrinsic biases in your sampling. Ironically, I think in order to trust the SSC dataset, we'd need to prove the claim with a different dataset, and thereby negate the value of using the SSC dataset.
How about a survey of happiness based on youthful head injuries? All the skaters I knew that didn’t go too druggy seem pretty well adjusted. My theory is we simply don’t remember all the ways we were aggrieved in Junior High to carry that emotional baggage as adults.
The original tweet feels more prescriptive, (probably based on the writer's personal experience & intuition), than an attempt at an honest observation of the world based on careful analysis. So I feel like their response to you, even if they accepted your poll as validly scientific, would be "Who cares whether people think they are mentally healthy? If they aren't having mystical experiences, then they are not."
If the Dark Night of the Soul is a thing, your "no personal history of anxiety or depression" criterion is going to run into it.
Anyhoo, isn't this originating in Maslow's "peak experiences", and him (I think) writing that it seemed to be a thing happening the most to healthy people?
Not to say I disagree, but I never trust people that self report as mentally healthy. It's very easy to repress yourself, and then outwardly you look mostly fine, inwardly you think you feel fine, but you're not really. I know people that display symptoms of anxiety and depression, but they self report as mentally healthy and get defensive when pressed. A tenuous grasp on a belief.
Unless you have a very special kind of mind, mystical experiences are few and far between. It's not surprising most people haven't had them. I'd be interested in seeing how this stat changes with age; have older people had mystical experiences more than younger people?
The real question is whether the people taking the survey (or those who made it or who try to interpret the results) have any idea what a "mystical" or "religious" experience is, or how it differs from mental illness, or whether they're even using a consistent definition. I would guess the answer, for the most part, is "no", which means the data set is basically meaningless.
I am an atheist, but once when I was in a church in London looking at mural of Joan of Arc, I had this feeling that it somehow made more sense to believe that she (and by extension the other saints, and God) still existed and was aware of me, than to believe that it isn't so. Somehow that it makes more sense to believe that everything is preserved rather than passing away. I wonder whether this is a "spiritual experience". I didn't have an altered state of consciousness or anything. Nor was I filled with conviction, and it didn't feel that disconnected from normal life, even though it was unusual. I felt for a while that it was possible to see things from a different perspective than my usual one.
"Mystical experiences naturally occur" seems like the sort of thing you can only say if you don't think mystical experiences are objectively meaningful, or you're defining them so broadly that they might as well be meaningless. It smacks of therapeutic deism. What is the purpose of these experiences? What do you learn from them? What do they do to you?
We know that drugs, for example, can consistently induce the feeling of meaningfulness or transcendence. I don't think this disproves the existence of something transcendent - any more than artificially inducing a phantom smell of smoke would disprove fire - but it should raise your bar for assuming that any perceived encounter with the numinous is worth anything.
(Cards on the table: I'm a fundie and that's why this stuff raises my hackles.)
Psychologist here: Big sweeping generalizations like the tweeter’s almost never turn out to be more than a little true. At most you’ll find a weak relationship between the traits at issue. People’s traits aren’t organized into columns, so to speak — with traits in the same column showing high correlations among pairs of them. Traits aren’t even organized into grids, with traits in the same square correlated. In fact, the whole idea of traits is kind of suspect. Everyone realizes this when they take some questionnaire that asks questions like, “Are you bold or timid?” “Well,” you think, “I’m bold in some situations and timid in others,” and that variability of characteristic behavior across situations is the norm. That’s why we all know people who are deeply wise and clever in their work but foolish in love relationships, people with hyperconventional homes and habits who are Burning Mfan fanatics, martial arts monsters who are passionate about growing African violets, etc. In fact, I think it may be that when somebody tends to act a certain way in all situations, that’s a sign of something amiss. Say somebody has high standards for themselves at their work and then when you introduce them to square dancing you see the same high standards kick in — their struggle fiercely to free themselves of typical novice mistakes — you might feel like something’s amiss? It’s just square dancing, for heaven’s sake, relax — right? It’s adaptive to have a different mind set in different situations, and when somebody doesn’t the lack of flexibility comes across as a bit unhealthy. So all this makes me doubt that a certain *kind* of person has mystical experiences. There are probably many paths to having them.
I am definitely subject to the oceanic experience Scott asked about. My teens and 20’s were the peak years for having it, but now in later years it still visits me from time to time. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt. I usually feel a wave of goosebumps when I have it, and often shed tears as well. So I’m trying to figure out why I’m subject to it. I expect some of it is wiring, but a kind of wiring that’s unrelated to mental health of illness — just a wiring for intensity. My father was an artist, and used to shake his head in frustration when he tried to convey how much he loved certain painters’ work — “they’re just . . . they’re just . . .wonderful,” he’d say. I think he was subject to a sort of visual ecstasy. And I was an only child, and used to entertaining myself and walking around thinking my own thoughts, and therefore maybe more likely to stumble into a moment when I looked at the sky and thought “space extends forever in every direction, and here’s this bush right here, and me looking at it all, it doesn’t mean a thing and here we all are.” And that thought sounds sort of bleak, maybe, but in fact was accompanied by a shiver of indescribable delight. Yum.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”
Well.....
I wouldn't think 1/8th of people are extremely mentally healthy any more then I think 1/8 people are professional athlete levels of strength training with ability to run a mile in a few minutes or lift their body weight. Pre-corona helps but, I think it would be rose tainted for people to say that 2020 society was going well.
This may offend someone formally trained in physiology but the perception in 4chan related community's is that autism and schizo is a spectrum and there plenty of reason to expect that a autism biased sample may have less schizo related experience. And "ssc" while probably not as bad a sample as lesswrong and looking at the data its biased towards autism and atheists.
If your in a hard line atheist community where people would react negatively to having a mystical experience it seems likely to me that a) people would downplay it b) feel shame and rate their mental health as 1 less then the max even if they are otherwise doing great
Your spirituality question specifies an "extreme" experience, the tweet is about routine experience. I think (common) meditation would never qualify for the first, but could easy qualify for the 2nd.
etc. etc. I think that take plenty defensible, and think a specific survey for the general public is done before calling it false. (altho Id probably specifically include mediation as a spiritual experience)
You just defined 'mystical experience' differently from what the tweet is trying to convey. There's no discrepancy here.
I think there's probably some selection bias here.
In the general population, religiosity may be correlated both with better mental health (due to sense of community, sense that God is looking out for you, etc.) and greater tendency towards spiritual experiences (due to greater tendency to attribute things to God), which would explain the tweet.
ACT readers are more likely to want to analyze all of their experiences logically in great detail (I think this is the one underlying theme in this community), regardless of religious affiliation. Conditioned on this, relatively few people will find conclusive evidence of mystical experiences, regardless of their mental health.
Anecdatapoint: I would regard myself as fairly mentally healthy, modulo some occasional intrusive thoughts. One time I had a experience that seems possibly in the same category, depending on how we're defining "mystical". I had just gotten back from lunch (cheeseburger and a soda, no alcohol or any other psychoactive substances consumed) and an extremely strong feeling of peace, calm, and contentment suddenly came over me. I probably sat in the parking garage for five minutes just blissed out on it before going inside, and it continued for probably another 20 or 30 minutes. Eventually it mostly subsided, but my mood stayed a bit elevated for the rest of the day.
I'm guessing it was just some chance fluke of biochemistry, but I'd never felt anything like that before or since, and until that point the day had been otherwise unremarkable. I could definitely imagine someone with a more spiritual mindset than I do having a comparable experience and interpreting it in a mystical way.
Seems to me your definition of "mentally healthy" could use some interrogation/explanation. For example, why are no family history or even personal history of depression inclusion/exclusion criteria?
Why do you count autism as excluding someone from being mentally healthy
Imagine making this tweet from the perspective of someone who frequently has mystical experiences: if those experiences stopped, you’d feel like you were missing out on something fundamental—something obviously went wrong. You conclude that people who don’t have these experiences probably also have something wrong. Is your generalization ad-hoc or just narrow-minded?
You see the results of the survey. You look at the criteria for “very mentally healthy” and object that it’s too narrow. A person with schizoid personality disorder, or a narcissist, or a psychopath could meet those criteria—something’s missing. Maybe spiritual receptiveness is also missing.
~~~~~~(end imagination)
"So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”. "
Well, yeah: this tweet sounds just like one of those "spiritual, not religious, eat pray love, live laugh love, I do yoga and mindfulness, life is such a beautiful gift (when you're well-off, healthy, and have only First World Problems), amn't I so special unlike those vulgar earth-bound moles who don't have numinous experiences every five minutes?"
It does very much depend on your definition of "mystical", but to be frank, it reminds me of the entire wellness, self-help, Chicken Soup for your budgie, industry. Go out on your deck at dawn with your cup of artisan coffee and take a deep breath as you marvel at the beauty around you before you start your day's work as an influencer or whatever.
The world is beautiful and wonderful. but you don't have to make a production out of it, Saskia.
(This is also why I can never make any headway with those mental health therapy-lite self-help books, they're full of crap like this: "if we were truly healthy and grounded and aware of our connection to the cosmos as stardust beings, we'd be having mystic crystal revelations all the time").
I feel like the answers from the survey you used are to a question that is phrased rather significantly differently from what you were inquiring about, _and_ that the tweet phrases it rather differently than the thing I suspect they're actually talking about. So... Not surprised by the result but I don't think anything was learned here.
The assumption built into the original tweet reminds me of the famous exchange from Life of Brian:
"You are all individuals!"
"I'm not."
Without a definition, I can't know if I've had such an experience or not.
Is it a "you'll know when you've had it" kind of thing?
"Good mental health" and "mystical experiences" sound oxymoronic. Get real and get checked.
I suppose it depends on how good you are at describing beauty. Or, more sensibly, that it's not clear whether a mystical exprience is best defined as a quale or as reaction to a quale.
I stopped reading at: "For this analysis..."
"The whole secret of life lies in the discovery of this Tao which can never be discovered. This does not involve an intellectual quest, but rather a spiritual change of one's whole being."
--Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
[This book contrasts and compares selected categories of mystics and on this point they agree (to the extent I understand what I'm reading!)]
As a child of the 1960s I have along-term interest in mystical experience. As a musician I have a particular interest in mystical experience induced by music. Here's an experience I had back in the ancient days:
During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion” – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn’t make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.
That was a powerful experience. It "haunted" me for years.
That’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memories faded & the ambivalence too. I’m playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.
I've been keeping a document where I collect accounts of altered states of musical consciousness: https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_10
This is interesting as well, though not necessarily about mystical experience in music: https://www.academia.edu/11767211/The_Magic_of_the_Bell_How_Networks_of_Social_Actors_Create_Cultural_Beings
I think there's a massive difference between encountering something "strange" or "beautiful", and having a mystical experience. For example, I have personally encountered fields of wildflowers that left me almost totally incoherent with their beauty ("they should've sent a poet !"). However, they were not supernatural objects. There was no fairy glamour involved, just biological organisms doing what they do. Other people could see the same flowers. So could bees and other insects. An object does not need to be mystically supernatural in order to be beautiful; in fact, I'd argue that real things are often more beautiful than anything we can imagine.
Half-baked take: effective mysticism improves and maintains your life. Effective mystical experiences lead toward having a healthy mind. Therefore, while not strictly speaking "false", the claim is causally misleading.
Why does a mental illness generations back in my family history count against my decades of personally flawless mental health?
Mystical experiences are often associated with the mentally ill -- for good reason.
But *maybe* the exceptionally healthy can also experience more mystical experiences than healthy normies.
Once upon a time, I followed a mostly raw instinctive eating diet. My dreams were brighter on the diet, and I could achieve certain meditative bliss states with little effort. I suspect that my experience was similar to those who go on long fasts. In both cases the body gets to get rid of troublesome molecular fragments generated by cooking.
But eating mostly raw/unmixed/by instinct had similar downsides as long fasting: weight loss, social isolation, and assorted cravings. So I quit after a time.
Based upon my experience, I believe thati it is possible to be healthier than normal and experience some interesting mystical bliss out states. But it is not easy! The foods on our grocery store shelves were selected more for ease of growing and storage, vs. edibility in a raw natural state. And maybe the foods which sustained humans before we adopted cooking are now extinct. So maybe it is only possible to achieve the states I experienced temporarily -- then the need for Real Food beats out the beauties of Bliss.
The Science isn't settled.
I think the issue is as much “mystical experience” as “mentally healthy”.
I consider myself mentally healthy, and consider that I have these sorts of experiences (numinous, indescribably beautiful); I just don’t see any reason to wrap them in woo and call them “mystical”, and I expect I’m not alone in this.
One obvious way to square the circle is that it is perfectly plausible for a guy to be struck numb by and stand in awe before some vast natural wonder, then months later take the survey and answer the question “no” because he thinks of saints and gurus and religious fanatics and so on when he thinks about “spiritual” events.
I predict that the rates of reported musical experiences will increase on this year's survey now that Scott has been blogging about jhanas.
Been talking to God since early childhood.
If you asked child-me, that definetely was a profound and blissful experience, though not distinct from normal life - after all it was and absolutely normal thing to do. Back then I'd classify myself as very mental healthy based on these criterias.
Now I figured out that it wasn't God - just my own brain and that I'm autistic. Putting myself in the God-communicating-stance isn't profound anymore, though it can be somewhat pleasant. Not sure how to count this as evidence in favour or agaist the hypothesis.
I'll try to save something the original claim by making a much less general one: I think people that feel wonder and awe at their place in the universe tend to be more fulfilled and happy people, and vice versa. I don't have data but it feels right when I think about people I know, as well as my own ups and downs.
I think you can be mentally 'healthy' without being fulfilled and happy, in the "nothing explicitly wrong with you" kind of way that Scott's data captures, but it's a "ships in harbour are safe" kind of health that I don't think is in the spirit of the tweet.
I also think wonder and awe are better descriptors for the thing the tweeter is getting at – if I stand on a mountaintop and look out at a view that takes my breath away and take a few minutes to just marvel at it all, I don't _really_ consider myself to have had a mystical experience, but I would have done back when I was religious. The mental state is the same though in either case, so I think the more directly descriptive language is better than talking about "mystical experiences" and bringing in all that baggage.
And yeah maybe this all waters down something obviously false to something vacuously true, but we shouldn't be surprised that it all adds up to reality.
I don't think his claim is true, but I also don't think you chose the right measure. I think, in fact, the measure you chose is probably anti correlated? Specifically, you're largely measuring whether people have had an easy time in life in addition to reporting that they are currently having a good time, but it seems to me that like ~everything else with humans, we get good in domains where we've had some resistance, but not too much. Ie. practice within some zone of proximal development. Life is hard sometimes, and to maintain mental health it's important you have some practice maintaining that health against resistance.
I'm not saying it's necessary to go through a hard time in order to be healthy, but I also think going through a medium-hard time in the past is probably correlated with mental health, not anti correlated.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusion, because I think your analysis is bad and I declare a mistrial.
1) Your defined categories don't align with what the tweet is saying
> Someone qualified as very mentally healthy if they said they had no personal or family history of depression, anxiety, or autism, rated their average mood and life satisfaction as 7/10 or higher, and rated their childhood at least 7/10 on a scale from very bad to very good. Of about 8000 respondents, only about 1000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”.
You are characterizing a person as healthy or not and this is not equivalent to a healthy state of mind. A person is not their state of mind. It is common for people's minds to occupy healthy and unhealthy states.
I'll also note, I would have to respond as "not healthy" since I have a severe trauma history... but I would describe myself as mentally health as a result of all the work I have done. 1-1 and Group Therapy (Modalities include: CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, Art, Music), somatic experiencing and breath work, acupuncture, PT, long distance running and swimming, meditation and mindfulness, spiritual practices, more time outside, emotional support dog, improving sleep and diet habits... I could go on.
2) Sample Bias
It was a SSC Survey. It is important to note that this community is full of thinkers. I would posit that this community will have less spiritual experiences than a more representative sample of the overall human population, regardless of how they self-assess
3) Inability to evaluate respondent understanding of the survey and self-assessment
i.e. What does a "spiritual experience" and the definition you provided mean to someone else?
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
And here, you share your result while dismissing other interpretations of the tweet as "hokey ad hoc". To me the other errors and complications are understandable, but this conclusion feels callous and close minded to me. It is an interesting idea and I would love to explore it more.
I am mentally healthy modulo some ADHD, and am prone to a lot of mystical experiences (I mean, in the class usually called 'mystical'; I don't endorse supernatural explanations). They're much more common when I push myself to extremes of one sort or another, such that my body is already in an altered state. Like, one of the more dramatic recent ones was after three days backpacking in the desert, I got a persistent hallucination of an angry face in the middle of my field of view. It was soundless but expressive, with lots of glowing tentacles writhing in a network overlaid across my normal vision. It came with a powerful sense of dread, and lasted for hours.
This is pretty typical- physical sustained extremes involving exposure and probably dehydration, absence of normal stimulus like phones or computer screens, and experiences displaying a mix of sensory hallucination and intense affective disruptions with a particular focus on facial and anthropomorphic pareidolia. I and my immediate family are also, as it happens, really prone to visual snow and tinnitus, so this happens in parallel with a brain that seems to have a lot of 'noise' between the perceptive and interpretive layers- and meditation can also be really intense for me, if less 'narrative'. To my knowledge, we don't have a history of schizophrenia or anything though.
So my general feeling as that mystical experiences have less to do with mental health in the traditional sense and more about what your brain does in response to getting whacked real hard- neurological crisis response for the weirdest 1-2% of times. Having spent a fair amount of time in the desert, I'm not at all surprised that so many major world religions seem to originate in them.
Wow, Scott, usually you're very good at steel-manning others' positions—but, just as your "Cheat Sheet For Reading Popular Media Articles About Psychiatry" was an outlier in terms of intellectual rigor, so too does this post come short of the rigor I usually expect from your posts:
Of course, you're perfectly free to define the artificial category of "very mentally healthy" however you want; however, that doesn't mean that others have to accept that definition. First, I question the rigor of relying on what people "say" their history is. What if a person has a "history of autism" purely because their parents interpreted their anti-authoritarian instincts as "mental illness" and fed one-sided, biased information to a psychiatrist? Why do some people's biases of normative behavior constitute a "history" of a lack of "mental health" on another person's part? Why is someone's reporting anxiety and depression considered a lack of "mental health," rather than merely evidence of the inherent tragedy and difficulty of human existence? (I note that, conveniently, you've defined "mental health," or, rather, a lack thereof, in such a way as to promote your own financial interest as a psychiatrist; obviously, if you chose a definition of "mental health" in a way that included more people, that would mean a smaller clientele of the "mentally ill," and that wouldn't be very good for business, now, would it?)
But, more importantly, you so self-assuredly declared that you're right, and that anyone who disagrees with you is using a "hokey ad hoc definition of 'the mind is healthy'"—while completely oblivious to the fact that you yourself just made up just such a definition (calling it by the name "artificial').
0/10 for this post
I answered positive to that question. Probably 1975, I was 14, fishing for salmon on the American River in Sacramento. At the upstream end of a small island, an a very strange feeling came over me ; kinda like the feeling after you've been hit in the head or shocked by electricity, that whole universe is buzzing feeling. Dragging my spinner through the water trying to attract a salmon, I snagged on something. Tightened the drag, and pulled, hoping to break free. The buzzing got more intense. The lure broke free, and came back with a piece of someone's shirt. Done with that stuff, I bugged out.
Fast forward to about 1990, I trained as an EMT. Part of the training is a day ride along in an ambulance. Our second call was a 'difficulty breathing' call. Just as we rolled up, that buzzing feeling came over me again. Yes that patient had died.
Later I described this feeling to a cop, who told me he has felt the same thing when coming to the scene of a death.
Definitely not. It’s sort of an absurd claim, and I suspect the correlation to the extent there is one is actually strongly with unhealth.
I really fail to see how "the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful" is synonymous with "mystical"
Seems like the tweeter is conflating profound with mystical.
You might be high-balling this - I can't remember which years I took the survey, but I'd have fallen in the mentally healthy category and have had mystical experiences. However, psychadelics were a factor; it wasn't a random occurrence.
Mostly a reply to various people, but I think the standard definition of "mentally healthy" has to be "wouldn't be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition/disorder." You could certainly argue that some forms of what are called mental illness are *actually healthier* than what psychiatry is aiming for, but it's fair enough to describe that as a hokey definition because it's distinctly non-standard.
I think this is like the imagination debate - if you're healthy and prone to mystical experiences, they're obviously normal and normative; if you're not, they're obviously a symptom of something.
I see at least two major confounders here.
1. I don't think that measuring "very mentally healthy"-ness thorugh self-reporting is super reliable.
2. I think that running this particular study in this particular community gives rise to some serious selection bias.
I expect the first effect to be statistically significant but not super strong and I expect the second effect to be so strong that we shouldn't really draw any conclusions from this survey.
Third (and causal) variable: intelligence
Obviously the originator of that comment never read any Russian Literature. It's known, no philosophers come from warm weather. In other words you need some contrasting experiences in life that are certain to have an impact on a 7/10 score of happiness, in order to truly feel the mystical. I'm sure my college self wouldn't agree, and would say, oh no, that contrived experience by the lake was extremely mystical, but life and middle age certainly teaches us something else about what this is all about
Very wholesome interpretation of the results there
Without knowing who made the tweet I would just think it was a bit of wu wu hyperbole. I know people that talk in a these terms and I always smile and shrug and say “Good for you!”
What an upsettingly offensive tweet to read with my morning coffee. I hate being reminded these people exist; it's exactly why I stay off Twitter. It seems intended to position the author as all-knowing and to provoke the next question: Tell me, your holiness, was my experience truly mystical up to your standards? Or am I sick and how should I get well?
Here's a controversial mental health take of my own: The assertion that other people must be mentally unhealthy if they don't have "mystical" experiences (a linguistic construct denoting, by design, an undefinable and unverifiable state but, it's implied, one which only the author's godlike judgment can easily discern, validate or reject) is the type of assertion that only a truly predatory narcissist could make. It's also an example of how social media has become a primary vector for mental illness, with cunningly injected appeals to FOMO and pseudo-scientific argle-bargle as its handmaidens.
"Mystical experiences" have throughout history been associated with madness. The tendency to elevate some unverifiable and subjective internal experience to "health" and thence to holiness has operated like a parasitic infection hopping from one human host to another for millennia; it survives because its victims, stripped of reason, gain power as a self-reinforcing collective. All religion boils down to this. But the average madman muttering on a street corner who believes his madness is the highest truth had not, until recently, infinite ink, paper and the means of distribution by which to infect millions of other potentially unstable people with his worldview. It only ever took one really slick psycho to start a cult, but now technology seems to have bred millions of them. The ancient parasite is out-competing itself, evolving and trying new tactics before our very eyes.
I'm so glad Scott ran an actual fact check. There couldn't be a better rebuttal.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
Reminder that you're basing this on your audience, in which there could be a vast number of uncorrelated precursors. It might better be thought of "This tweet is false for the type of individual who would complete my 2020 SSC survey." You then have to ask if the average participate in your survey is representative of society's population as a whole.
You showed that lack of mental health is a factor in having mystical experiences. You did not show that being mentally healthy makes it implausible someone would have a mythical experience. Neither did you show that it is implausible for someone who lacks mental health to not have mystical experiences. So both the mentally healthy and mentally unhealthy may or may not have mystical experiences, but the relationship between mental health and mystical experiences is statistically significant.
Mysticism is the belief that knowledge can be obtained without effort, i.e. through prayer, revelation, instinct, LSD, meditation, etc. Thus, while I'm sure that a mentally healthy person could have a mystical experience, it seems to me that too many such experiences would eventually threaten your mental health through bad epistemology.