Engagement of understudied populations as community change: The South Texas ADRC model.

Individuals the world over report experiences that fall outside their usual or day-to-day lived reality, such as suddenly hearing voices when nobody is around, feeling a connection to something greater, strong emotional experiences such as love, compassion or despair []. While these nonordinary experiences (NOEs) are often regarded as unusual, research indicates that these experiences are surprisingly common and intrinsic to the human condition []. Taves and Barlev [] define such as “experiences that stand out to people or are marked by them as special… relative to what they consider ordinary or everyday, without assuming that the ordinary-nonordinary distinction is cross-culturally stable” (p. 52). As already implied by the authors, the interpretation of NOEs varies widely: some individuals may perceive them with euphoria and a sense of blessing, while others experience uncertainty and anxiety. Some individuals believe that the experience happens for a specific reason and may be caused by some supernatural entity whereas others think such an experience just happened by chance. Distinct from everyday experiences, NOEs can be highly valued in certain spiritual and religious traditions, often associated with spiritual growth and wellbeing. On the other hand, phenomenologically comparable experiences are being used in psychiatric manuals as symptoms of dissociative disorders or psychosis []. The interpretations that follow experiences are known as appraisals, which can be defined as “the outcome of a multi-level process that humans and other animals rely on when determining what is happening, that is, to interpret situations and events” []. Appraisals constitute a crucial factor for understanding the life impact of NOEs. Cultural and personal factors are likely to significantly shape these interpretations and lead to the framing of NOEs as religious, spiritual, paranormal, or pathological [–], which in turn may result in human flourishing or in mental health problems. Evaluation processes together with the context in which these experiences occur appear to play a critical role in determining outcomes associated with these experiences [–]. Instruments designed to measure these kinds of experiences frequently display interpretations and theoretical frameworks embedded within the description of the experiences themselves, which often leads to a conflation of researchers’ own appraisals with the purely phenomenological account of the experience []. An example of an inherently spiritual/religious framework can be seen in the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale [], which frames an experience of a nonordinary presence positively (“I feel God’s presence”). In contrast, a pathological framing of NOEs is observable in clinical scales such as The Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE) [] which interprets similar experiences as traits of schizotypal personality and includes explicitly negative appraisals within the query about the experience (e.g., “evil presence”). The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE) has been developed by Taves and colleagues as a way to overcome this methodological hurdle by addressing subjectively recognizable features of experiences [], with the explicit aim to broaden the scope for studying nonordinary phenomena. The inventory is based upon a subject-dependent definition of “nonordinary”, referring to nonordinary experiences as salient and special from the experiencer’s point of view, and relative to what they consider ordinary or not. The experience items were either adapted from previous scales or inspired by religious and spiritual literature ([], p. 5–7). Along with these experience items, the INOE has included a small number of appraisals. Currently, the INOE features seven follow-up questions around the meaning-making processes and contextual features, such as the mental state of the individual when the experience occurred.