Llano Lourido, I. A. (2021). Psychosis, mysticism, and environment; an autoethnographic analysis of life touched by the extra-ordinary [Unpublished Master’s thesis]. Alef Trust & Liverpool John Moores University.

Using an auto-ethnographic methodology and with the intention of analysing the relationship between psychosis, mysticism, and environment, this dissertation gathers the stories from three persons (including the author) that have lived in the threshold between psychosis, mysticism, and conventional reality. Throughout the analysis, the dissertation recognizes the important effect that the sociocultural constructs that contextualize each person have in determining a diagnosis of their experience as psychotic or as mystic; and the power of this diagnosis in determining the amount of distress and social adjustment of each case. After summarizing the main approaches coming from transpersonal psychology, which expands the conventional psychiatric paradigm into including some aspects of spirituality, the dissertation addresses issues found in the great majority of the transpersonal theories which still acknowledge a polarity between psychosis and spirituality. Finally, the author proposes an expansion of the perspective, to include what he calls ‘storm rotation’: a spontaneous self-less aspect of experience within psychosis and mysticism; and what he calls the ‘eye of the storm’: the non-dual aspect. One of the conclusions of the dissertation is that more research produced with people with psychosis as researchers, co-researchers, or advisors, would be helpful and should be supported in order to understand such complex realities.