Narrating the Breakthrough: Spiritual Awakening, Mental Health and the Struggle for Meaning in New Age Memoirs

This article examines contemporary spiritual memoirs (mostly New Age) that challenge traditional distinctions between mental breakdown and spiritual awakening. Many of these first-person accounts reframe a range of disturbing symptoms as part of profound inner transformation rather than disorder. Focusing on texts by Gopi Krishna, Suzanne Segal, David Carse and other authors, this study investigates how contemporary spiritual memoirists construct their narratives of spiritual awakening by choosing interpretive strategies. Their lived experience may be recontextualised as a spiritual event or mental affliction, or it may remain in between the two, in the space of interpretive ambiguity. In order to navigate the spectrum between medical and spiritual explanations, these awakening experiences (often spontaneous and unsolicited) tend to be interpreted using a mix of psychology, spirituality, and personal intuition. In cases where definitive interpretation remains elusive, this narrative ambiguity itself becomes a productive space for meaning-making.