More thoughts on why mystical, psychic, paranormal and High Strangeness experiences are typically dismissed as “crazy” in the mainstream — and why many of us fear and avoid woo-woo:
The medical establishment — and specifically the field of psychiatry, as a cultural locus of authority — has been indirectly one of the major gatekeepers of what gets to be considered “valid reality”. By designing diagnostic criteria that aim to flag when an individual’s mind has broken with reality, they’ve needed to come up with a standardized definition of what’s real and what isn’t.
Now, to be fair, that hegemony is shifting. But it was only in 1994 that the category “spiritual or religious problem” was added to the DSM. This category, after over a century of modern psychiatry, was finally included to give clinicians a differential diagnostic possibility that acknowledges that someone could experience spiritual troubles and not be psychotic.