Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith
Date: September 4, 2025
Host: Dr. Pierce Salguero
Guest: Richard Saville-Smith, Independent Scholar

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep dive into Richard Saville-Smith’s 2023 book, Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies, published by Bloomsbury. The conversation explores the intersections of madness, psychiatry, and religion. Saville-Smith calls for a re-examination of how acute religious experiences are framed, critiquing both psychiatric pathologization and humanities-driven sanitization of such experiences. The episode examines how these ideas relate to both Western and Asian religious and medical traditions and considers their implications for contemporary scholars, practitioners, and those with lived experience.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction of Guest and Mad Studies

• Background:

  • PhD from University of Edinburgh (2020).
  • Focus: Relationship between psychiatry, religious experience, and "madness."
  • Resident of the Isle of Skye, Scotland, living as an "intentionally independent scholar."
  • Personal lived experience of madness, identifies as a "mad person."
    (03:14–04:55)

• Mad Studies:

  • Rooted in feminist, critical race, and queer theory.
  • Centers marginalized voices in psychiatric and religious discourses.
  • Seeks to challenge norms of what is deemed "rational" or "normal" in academia.
    (03:14–04:55)

2. Book Structure and Scope

• Three-Part Structure:
  • Part 1: Western religious studies perspectives on religious experience.
  • Part 2: Psychiatric discourse and its globalizing influence.
  • Part 3: Application of developed methods to the Gospel of Mark (case study).
  • Engagement with theorists like William James, Rudolf Otto (global intent, though Western writers).
  • Critique of psychiatry’s pretense of global applicability (e.g., DSM).
    (06:21–08:12)

“I've always had a kind of very strong view that what I'm trying to do is to address the human possibility of religious experience, irrespective of any particular faith tradition ... I'm engaging in a global species-wide engagement about how we talk about things.” – Richard Saville-Smith (07:38)

3. Framing the Problem: Psychiatry vs. Humanities

• The "Power Struggle":
  • Modern psychiatry often subverts, dismisses, or reduces religious experiences to pathology, gaining cultural power over religious or spiritual institutions.
  • Humanities scholars, conversely, tend to sanitize or rationalize extraordinary experiences to "protect" subjects from accusations of insanity.
  • Example: Eliade’s treatment of shamanism, striving to distance shamanic experience from "madness." (08:56–12:15)

“Psychiatrists have found it expedient to subvert, dismiss and eradicate the relevance of religious experience ... by diminishing it, they gain power.” – Richard Saville-Smith (09:04)

• Saville-Smith’s Intervention:
  • Proposes the concept of "acute religious experiences"—experiences that are “mad” but not necessarily pathological.
  • Aims to challenge the default pathologizing of the psychiatric lens and the excessive sanitizing of the humanities. (11:47–12:15)

4. Lived Experience and Reclaiming ‘Madness’

• Self-Identification:
  • Saville-Smith identifies as "bonkers, crazy, mad person," deliberately reclaiming stigmatized language (13:19–14:55).
  • Connects this reclamation to similar movements in neurodivergence and queer theory (“reclaiming a derogatory term and using that as a sort of identity ... field of inquiry and academic methodology.”) (15:10)
• Tradition vs. Medicalization:
  • Psychiatric frameworks have devalued traditional roles like the "seer" or shaman—those once culturally valorized for their visionary capacities are now seen as psychiatric subjects. (16:02–16:48)

5. Acute Religious Experiences: Definition and Features

• Focus on Extremity:

  • Interested not in mild/prosaic altered states but in “crazy ... irrational ... un-understandable” experiences that can deeply transform individuals.
  • Draws analogy with both psychosis and mystical states (schizophrenia, bipolar as “diagnoses you’d get,” but highly contested even within psychiatry itself). (18:05–20:46)

• The "DREAD" Framework:

  • D: Diversity
  • R: Religious
  • E: Extreme (core: "far out there")
  • A: Ambivalent
  • D: Determined
    (21:26)

“You don't get to have an acute religious experience without being far out there, far out of a place where you are no longer able to know, no longer able to reflect on who you are or what you're doing … When I'm mad, I'm driven by the hand of God.” – Richard Saville-Smith (22:21)

• Adaptive vs. Maladaptive Experiences:
  • No universal distinction—it's contextually constructed. Example of LSD trip: different outcomes for different people. (23:26–24:49)

6. Rethinking the Pathology/Sanitation Dichotomy

• Challenging Reductionist Frameworks:
  • Rather than seeing extraordinary experiences as either pathological (psychiatry) or sanitized/rationalized (humanities/religion), Saville-Smith argues for a phenomenological acceptance: embrace the “madness” of such experiences as intrinsic rather than deviant. (25:23–27:18)

“We can say yes, there's a plurality here ... but no, it is not a psychiatric disorder, because look at the person's life. ... What that [psychiatric pathologizing] has done has been to inflict a wrong. And what I'm seeking to do is to reset that power play and say ... we can accept the phenomenological descriptions, but we don't accept the underlying diagnostic.” – Richard Saville-Smith (26:27)

• Contemporary Relevance:
  • In cases like meditation-induced psychosis or spiritual emergencies, the dominant impulse is to either pathologize or rationalize/sanitize. Saville-Smith suggests "madness" can be both sacred and uncontrollable at once; context and integration are crucial. (27:18–29:31)

“Religion is much madder than we want it to be. ... You are courting a type of experience that is potentially very much out of control ...”
– Dr. Pierce Salguero (31:31)

7. Bodily Diversity and Genetic Susceptibility

• Susceptibility to Madness/Religious Experience:
  • Not everyone is equally prone to acute experiences—may be genetic/embodied differences (referencing schizotypy, diversity in responses). (32:23–35:07)

“Not everybody can be mad. ... Some people want everything to be a kind of spectrum ... But I think that's just how it works, that only some people have susceptibility ...” – Richard Saville-Smith (34:13)

• Parallel with Queer Theory:
  • Just as sexuality is not a single norm, neither are capacities for religious experience. (35:07)

8. Cultural Contexts and Ontological Worlds

• Interpretation Mapped by Culture:

  • Acute experiences are interpreted through local ontologies—what is seen or experienced is shaped by cultural expectation (e.g., seeing angels vs. sea creatures). (36:32–37:31)

• Case Study: Spirit Possession in Thailand:

  • Local positive framing (empowerment, blessing, healing) can coexist with biomedical, psychiatric, or Western humanities interpretations.
  • Saville-Smith would frame these as “acute religious experiences,” avoiding baggage of "madness" term when inappropriate. (37:39–40:47)

• Interdisciplinary Invitation:

  • Acute religious experience as a conceptual bridge across psychiatry, anthropology, humanities, and religious studies. (40:47–41:46)

“An invitation to people to read beyond their own disciplinary corners.” – Richard Saville-Smith (41:46)

9. The Gospel of Mark as a Case Study

• Chapter 3 Application:
  • Re-examines the life of Jesus through a mad studies lens—visions, voices, and crucifixion as phenomenological elements of “madness.”
  • Contrasts with early 20th-century psychiatric pathologization of Jesus, reframing experiences as “mad but not pathological.” (42:31–44:52)

“I say, you’re not wrong. They weren’t wrong. They were just rude. ... How do we look at the phenomenology of the experience of Jesus’s life through a mad studies, acute religious experience point of view?”
– Richard Saville-Smith (42:41)

• Parallel with Buddha:
  • Leaving royal life for asceticism is similarly “mad” in the sense of being beyond the boundaries of “normal.” (44:53–45:17)

10. Future Directions

• Religion, Spirituality, and Consciousness:
  • Upcoming work will theorize the interplay between religion, spirituality, consciousness, and madness—possibly drawing analogies from sexuality/gender studies.
  • Spirituality as universal human substrate, religion as cultural construction. (45:59–47:07)

Notable Quotes

• On the Dilemma of Interpretation:
  “Neither side wants to take seriously ‘I saw God’ as a deeply felt personal reality ... that's the space that your use of this acute religious experience and this kind of mad studies approach is going to give us an alternative to those two reductive discourses and.”
  – Dr. Pierce Salguero (11:47)

• On Lived Experience:
  “I'm not trying to get healing from it. I don't try and get fixed. I accept it's something that I have to live with ... I embrace it as something that I am.”
  – Richard Saville-Smith (13:19–14:55)

• On Academic Responsibility:
  “Academics want to rationalize and they want to write papers that make sense ... the bits in the middle where everything’s going off and nothing makes sense are difficult to capture in writing.”
  – Richard Saville-Smith (30:25)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction and Mad Studies Background: 03:14–04:55
• Book Structure and Global Relevance: 06:21–08:12
• Power Struggle: Psychiatry vs. Humanities: 08:56–12:15
• DREAD Framework & Features of Acute Experiences: 21:26–23:04
• Self-Description as a Mad Person: 13:19–14:55
• Integration, Social Impact, and Cultural Context: 27:18–29:31
• Genetics and Spectrum of Experience: 32:23–35:07
• Case Study: Reinterpreting the Gospel of Mark: 42:31–44:52
• Future Research Directions: 45:59–47:07

Conclusion

Richard Saville-Smith’s work challenges entrenched academic and clinical frameworks by reframing “madness” and acute religious experiences as valid, intrinsically human, and culturally variable phenomena—not mere pathology or sanitized myth. By inviting plural and phenomenological perspectives (rather than reductionist, pathologizing, or rationalist ones), Saville-Smith’s intervention opens new doors for interdisciplinary research, self-understanding, and the acceptance of difference in the experience of the sacred.