Both kundalini awakening and psychosis involve altered perceptions of reality. Psychology doesn't distinguish. In fact, I tend to think that it depends on how you adjust to it. If you can incorporate the realization that reality is less solid than we thought, and were taught, in a functional way, and keep the benefits of that realization, it's the doorway to an awakening.
Otherwise, if a person labels the phenomena as a problem, once they have that label it becomes a bigger problem.
When the perceived reality fluctuations caused by energy shifts also get attached to negative emotions, negative beliefs, or negative memories it gets solidified in a non-useful way. If a person's family or loved ones starts freaking out about the person's difficulty distinguishing reality, it doesn't help either.
In an environment where the reality distortions are embraced and celebrated and welcomed - instead of feared as they often are in the Western world, it would tend to be more positive.
Once I worked with a 19yr old young man who's father had indoctrinated him into certain aspects of Buddhism which should go together with certain practices, but that part was left out, so this kid only told the parts about "reality isn't real", and he started looking for and focusing on that, and ended up getting a diagnosis of some kind of schizophrenia.
The famous family therapist Virginia Satir once described an experiment she did where she took 2 teens, who both were diagnosed with different flavors of schizophrenia, and after around 90 days in patient stay had somewhat recovered, and sent them home with the other family. Kind of a family swap. Fast forward 90 days they were both back in the facility, but their diagnosis's had flipped - consistent with the family. So, it seemed the patterns of severely dysfunctional families could create specific kinds of psychosis. Of course, there are many problems with that as an experiment, and we can't scientifically extrapolate a theory from that, but it is interesting.
So, how real is reality? I think there are also those that bump into the same phenomena and use it as inspiration, or ignore it, or .... anything else. I think most have moments of possible awakening, and there is a wide range of ways people respond. Full awakening and full psychosis are the two most obvious because they are the most extreme.
Promise.
