Altered states of consciousness are know to trigger psychosis in people who many develop bipolar disorder.

It’s relatively easy for me to deliberately trigger psychosis, despite being on antipsychotics. And it is a very bad idea for me to do that. Losing touch with reality isn’t exactly fun.

For those who are interested, I’ve written about the four-month-long psychotic break that ended with me being diagnosed bipolar. https://kayode.co/blog/4106/living-with-psychosis/

Not that I’m aware of. But bipolar disorder is (very) poorly understood. Asking for evidence would imply for instance, that we know what bipolar IS, and from my knowledge, I don’t think we do. In order to have evidence that meditation and bipolar interact we would have to know what bipolar affects in our system that causes it. As far as I know we don’t know what causes it/how it works exactly. We have some inklings of what’s involved.

What we have is some medications that work with relatively extreme side effects (I am now pre diabetic due to daily Seroquel use) and sort of folk tradition of what to do and not to do - ie bipolar people are advised to stay away from religion for instance.

In my experience both the medication and the folk tradition are mostly right actually, as weird as that might sound. It’s not like psychologists are performing huge studies, but they can see patterns in the individual cases when they are studied in bulk - ie religious individuals might have more psychotic episodes etc.