That seems valid, but it may help to note that the sort of leaps in logic made by schizophrenics are generally much more personalized and confused than typical New Age explanations, whereas the NA explanations at least fall into large forms where if you recognize the broad patterns. For example, “nuclear powered rats in the sewer” is clearly schizophrenic (that’s an actual paraphrase of a statement from a schizophrenic) whereas “obsidian helps centering the chakras because its black character absorbs the negativity” is pretty clear New Age. Schizophrenics also much more frequently involve things like very strange wordplay and puns in their logic. I’d point to this paper, but the paper is in German. At one point, I had a summary of the paper in English, but that was a very long time ago and I don’t know where it is now. This paper seems to give similar examples in English (with no comment about the correctness of their thesis on my part since I haven’t had time to look at that aspect).
Note also that schizophrenia isn’t the only mental illness with hallucinatory elements.
That seems valid, but it may help to note that the sort of leaps in logic made by schizophrenics are generally much more personalized and confused than typical New Age explanations, whereas the NA explanations at least fall into large forms where if you recognize the broad patterns. For example, “nuclear powered rats in the sewer” is clearly schizophrenic (that’s an actual paraphrase of a statement from a schizophrenic) whereas “obsidian helps centering the chakras because its black character absorbs the negativity” is pretty clear New Age. Schizophrenics also much more frequently involve things like very strange wordplay and puns in their logic. I’d point to this paper, but the paper is in German. At one point, I had a summary of the paper in English, but that was a very long time ago and I don’t know where it is now. This paper seems to give similar examples in English (with no comment about the correctness of their thesis on my part since I haven’t had time to look at that aspect).
Note also that schizophrenia isn’t the only mental illness with hallucinatory elements.