“Fact Check: Do All Healthy People Have Mystical Experiences?”, 2022-12-23 ():
I saw this on Twitter the other day…
My most controversial mental health take is that mystical experiences naturally occur when the mind is healthy.
If you’re not regularly encountering the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful, something isn’t right.
…For this analysis [of my SSC survey] I defined an artificial category “very mentally healthy”. 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 8,000 respondents, only about 1,000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”.
Of total respondents, 21% reported having a spiritual experience, plus an additional 18% giving the “unclear” answer.
Of the very mentally healthy, only 17% reported having a spiritual experience, plus 14% giving the “unclear” answer.
In a chi-square test, the difference was statistically-significant at p < 0.001.
So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.