I would say schizophrenia like symptoms were a spiritual awakening. Never was diagnosed SZ, though schizoaffective is close enough.
When younger I am the one who didn’t understand what was going on and had NOBODY to teach me about the spiritual side at all.
When I began to learn about spiritual awakenings it explained just about everything that had been going on.
My reply to this is that there is a difference between hallucinating and spiritual visions. The 2 can seem identical. That can be a huge problem in differentiating between them.
My experience is this: Visions come few and far between, or maybe several over a week or 2, then stop for several months or even more than a year. They have meaning most of the time and can be explained on a spiritual level. Sometimes a vision will show you a scene of something that hasn’t happened yet and then it happens at a later time. These are prophetic visions and spiritual.
Hallucinations can happen regularly or not so regularly and usually carry no meaning at all. Your brain playing with your optics can create a variety of lights, trails, color fluctuations, wavy walls, etc.
There is a more obscure area here also where a person can literally manifest a vision projected from their own mind, ‘creating’ a hallucination or manifestation that is actual a projection of ones own thoughts, conscious or unconscious…that would be neither spiritual or hallucination, it has to do with natural energies on a quantum level.
Same goes for voices: spiritual voices are few and far between and have meaning. the biggest identifier of the spiritual voice will be confirmation, meaning that what you are told is either real knowledge or the thing told you actually happens later. Some of mine have been as simple as telling me to take certain turns when lost and what I will see when I do, and have been accurate, precisely.
Hallucinatory voices are more like this you said here:
But I also believe they can at times be demons with the mocking and belittling a lot of people get.
I have dealt with spiritual type manifestations most of my life. Any other symptoms or reactions I have had seem to be always based on either trauma I experienced or alcohol/drug use. I notice now and all the time I have spent off drugs and alcohol that the psychoseses involved are not present and when they were they were very temporary, not ongoing.
The spiritual manifestations on occasion have always come, and the best ones have been when I am completely sober. Spirit manifestations get twisted when you are drunk or high, and you can’t even really tell sometimes if they are spirits or the intoxicant talking.
I have however had some real spiritual experiences drunk and high, witnessed by others with me, some of who were sober at the time and we all heard or saw the same things. I have also frequented many haunted places in the past…places known for spirit manifestations.
Over the years i have learned to tell the difference between delusional experiences and real spiritual ones. It has all been an awakening. I learned far much more confronting it, learning about it from every angle, and not just one side.
I do not go for doctors explanations that its all in the head and is mental illness needing to be treated by drugs. i also do not go for the ultra spiritual that automatically tells people they are possessed or oppressed by demons. I realize both a spiritual AND psychological model may apply and view it from that standpoint, evaluating each experience depending on what it is…