Acute Religious Experiences
A sneak peak into an Unpsychology Magazine interview with Richard Saville-Smith
An upcoming conversation with Richard Saville-Smith
Here at Unpsychology we are deep in preparations for our next magazine issue: Imaginings Issue 9.2. One of the highlights for me in these preparations has been my recent interview with Richard Saville-Smith, the author of ‘Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies’ (published by Bloomsbury.)
I spoke with Richard about the book and about our common interest and lived experiences in madness. Our conversation was rich, meandering and full of laughter: I can't wait for it to be shared with our Unpsychology community!
Richard writes about the intersection of madness, mental disorders, and acute religious experiences, from a mad studies perspective. In a recent interview in Psychology Today with Sarah An Myers, he gives us a flavour of his work and outlook, and a hint of how his work chimes so well with Unpsychology’s concerns:
“I come to this material from a mad studies perspective, which is tolerant of the idea that mad is not necessarily bad. As a mad person myself, currently detained in a psychiatric facility, I appreciate this is a marginal perspective, in the same way, that feminism, critical race theory, and LGBQT+ were once marginal positions.
There is hope for change and this work contributes to that change. What I do by rereading the theorists of the 20th century is to identify the social pressure sanism brought to bear in a generation of rich white educated scholarship for which mental disorder was and remains a source of embarrassment and invalidation, except for William James.”
In our Imaginings issues – and in future magazines and publishings – we are increasingly committed to exploring how the boundaries of our supposedly ‘normal’,’ straight’ ‘sane’ and ‘neurotypical’ social and ecological worlds are drawn – and the implications of these for human futures and histories in our crisis-riven world. Richard’s voice is one of many that we are looking to highlight and draw on incoming months. As he puts it:
“The result of this work is a recovery of the role of madness in religious, and therefore human history. This is a celebration of madness that faces the shame of mental illness and challenges the scholarly willingness to sanitize madness. By proposing the language of acute religious experiences, I offer a new way to see and understand the positive contribution of madness in the history of our human story.”
Richard’s book: Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies is published by Bloomsbury and is available from https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/acute-religious-experiences-9781350272910/
‘Acute Religious Experiences’ seminar in Edinburgh
During my chat with him, Richard also mentioned an upcoming event in which he will be participating, on Wednesday 25 October. Here is the promotional blurb:
The Religious Studies Seminar hosts a conversation between Ann Taves, Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, and Richard Saville-Smith about his new book, Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies (Bloomsbury 2023). Acute Religious Experiences is a transdisciplinary work which critically engages with psychiatric tradition and theorists of the numinous, possession, shamanism, mysticism, psychedelics and peak experiences. Saville-Smith proposes there is an excessive timidity in the way many authors seek to protect their subjects from the psychiatry which pathologises symptoms such as visions, voices and possession without recognising the significance of their cultural contribution. By challenging the idea that madness is necessarily badness, space for a more interesting conversation between the humanities/the social sciences and psychiatry is made possible by the introduction of explanatory pluralism. And, it transpires, there is a lot more madness in the human cultural record than the contemporary academic narrative allows.
Please do feel welcome to attend this free event and hear more about Richard's groundbreaking work in the fields of Religious Studies and Mad Studies.
It strikes me as profoundly ironic that many human beings will willingly take psychadelic drugs in search of transcendental experiences and yet label those individuals who spontaneously experience "trips" as mad. Perhaps it is not just ironic but actually somewhat insane.
On and on it goes... society's fears of being out of control and the invisible unknown imposed on those that often through severe trauma, access other worlds or other lifetime's in humanity's akashic records. Indigenous cultures have always understood this function and assisted those individuals to negotiate this safely. And yet we in the Western world call ourselves civilised .. ha ! Ironic indeed.