Dear Rod,
Your question is interesting and I often think to myself what my colleagues would say, if I told them about the 11:11 time-prompting phenomenon.

I am not a psychologist, but a social worker, and I practice psychoanalytic therapy with people.
What I noticed when I used to work in a psychiatrist's office, was that if people reported mystical experiences of a religious or spiritual nature, my colleagues often diagnosed these folks with "Schizoaffective disorder." This is not quite as severe as Schizophrenia. It happened so often, that I began to realize that when they didn't know what to do with these reportings, they simply went with "Schizoaffective," not feeling quite comfortable to use the term "Schizophrenia." I had many of these folks as clients, and I never saw even a touch of psychosis. (Psychosis is a term that essentially means that a person does not live in reality, they live in a delusional, made-up world, and they have false beliefs and experiences. If you ever saw the movie "A Beautiful Mind," the main character was psychotic.)
So what bothered me about it, was that the diagnoses were made solely based on these religious or spiritual experiences . . and these patients were not reporting other areas of dysfunction at all, other than emotions we all have, or the occasional struggles with depression or anxiety (which do not point to psychosis). Those are neurotic concerns, not psychotic ones. When you learn how to diagnose mental disorders, one of the things you learn, is that you can't diagnose based on people's spiritual or religious beliefs or experiences. The example we are given, is that many cultures believe in the "Evil Eye," which means that someone has in a sense put a spell on you, with their envious thoughts. So the example is given and we are instructed that if a person believes in this, as many do, you can't label them as delusional, it's instead owing to their spiritual/religious/ethnic/cultural upbringing. And yet -- when it came to these mystical or spiritual experiences people reported -- they were calling it "Schizoaffective disorder," contrary to this teaching.
The types of experiences people had reported ranged from being visited by a deceased loved one, to receiving a sign from a deceased loved one, to feeling a sense of having been transported to a higher level of consciousness during prayer or meditation.

Wouldn't the Buddhist monks love to know they were psychotic, according to these parameters??? LOL, what would the Dalai Lama think about that, I wonder?
So you can judge for yourself based on what I've shared here, whether you agree that these experiences are "Diagnosable" LOL ! ! !

I always personally minded it, because the attitude suggests that the "correct medical" view is that there is no God, and thus, there can be no special or unexplained spiritual occurrences -- it must always mean the person is delusional. I personally object to this!!
With love, Michele
