I just read this article in the great new Psychology Tomorrow magazine- http://www.psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/enlightenments-evil-twin/

The article points out the importance of working with a psychotherapist who knows the difference between a spiritual emergence or a psychiatric emergency – aka “nervous breakdown”. All too often spiritual seekers are being insensitively treated by psychiatry, which btw has totally eliminated spiritual concerns from the new DSM5.

In my Guidebook for CP I address this in a number of ways. It is important to note, that even if we are not seasoned meditators or intensely pursuing spiritual paths, the intensity of spiritual frequencies being poured into humanity’s psyche is increasing. “According to Hubbard, our current “psychological weather” is gaining intensity, pressure, and is “heating up with psychological tension and sensitivity, ready to burst beyond the walls of self-centered consciousness… This pent-up energy is causing mental disturbances, breakdowns, ecstasies and visions.”[i] Psychotherapists and helping professionals of all disciplines need to keep this in mind, as more and more patients are showing up with symptoms that are not readily diagnosed. We need to understand that as we are gaining insight and developing our essential selves the egoic-mind, both for the individual and collective is putting up a good fight. John Welwood calls it the 

“Existential anxiety arises as a sense of impending death, a dawning realization that the I is nothing solid, that it has no true support and is continually threatened by the possibility of dissolving back into the egoless ground of being from which it arose. Ego contains at its very core a panic about egolessness, an anxious reaction to the unconditional openness that underlies each moment of consciousness. [i]