Mental disorder and its treatment as a transformative experience
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences February 8, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s11097-025-10059-6 via OpenAlex
Summary
Transformative experiences are crucial for understanding and treating mental disorders, as exemplified by major depressive disorder. Developing such a disorder typically involves an experience that changes one's perspective, making it hard for others to understand without having similar experiences. Successful treatment also requires a transformative experience, which can occur through pharmacological, psychological, or psychedelic-assisted methods, each offering different pathways to recovery. This highlights important ethical considerations regarding informed consent in treatment.
Study at a glance
| Population | individuals experiencing major depressive disorder |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Developing and overcoming major depressive disorder requires transformative experiences that change one's perspective. |
Abstract
Abstract According to L.A. Paul, undergoing an experience is transformative if we learn something we cannot learn without having the experience and if it substantially changes our point of view. While the implications of transformative experiences have primarily been discussed in the context of rational choice, their underlying concept has also proven fruitful in the context of unchosen occurrences. The present paper examines mental disorder and its treatment from a transformative experiential perspective, using major depressive disorder as an exemplary case. It shows that developing a mental disorder typically requires a transformative experience since the two popular mental disorder classification systems primarily classify such disorders on an experiential basis. This provides an explanation for the lack of understanding mentally disordered people often face: their experiential state is epistemically inaccessible for those who have not experienced a similar state before. Furthermore, successful treatment of mental disorder again requires a (personally) transformative experience that results in the disorder’s overcoming. The paper examines pharmacological, psychological, and psychedelic-assisted treatment and reveals that each of them uses a different transformative route to recovery: a finding relevant, for example, to ongoing debates in medical ethics about informed consent.