it doesn’t seem it’s all that uncommon

Naturally it’s impossible for doing it wrong to be common.

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For most, a meditation retreat is the equivalent of a couch potato getting up one morning and trying to run a marathon. Injuries should not be surprising.

This mental state doesn’t just result from Buddhist meditation. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of optimal experience and ascetic prayer practices of monks and hermits of various Christian orders are some other examples. Intense exercise, reading a good book, caring for and nurturing family members — many activities can result in feelings of transcendence from the self. You might say it’s something a lot more common then we realize. We just don’t notice it in our modern world while overly concerned our modern tasks.

It looks like these people have some deeper problems besides not taking to meditation.

Meditation brings deep psychological baggage to the surface, which is what these adverse effects more or less are. The experience of short term pain and adversity is part of a healing process, and the individual often feels fantastic after the “dark night” runs it’s course.

Of course, there are always a few outliers who get extreme adverse effects and may never fully recover. In traditional meditation cultures this is well known.

I see a major culprit being the tendency to sell meditation to today’s secular public as a relaxation technique. When it is anything but.

Also, the “real deal” systems (ranging the gamut from Centering Prayer to dhikr to Satipatthana) were developed within specific religious traditions. The modern-day tendency to “eclectically” decontextualize these practices is old news by now.

So we have large numbers of people practicing these techniques seemingly detached from their cultural-religious moorings AND, instead of relaxation, they are confronted with the deeply shattering mysterium tremendum. The Truth That shows them the truth about themselves as well.

“Psychologically-damaging” and “nihilism” don’t quite capture what ensues.