Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith

Summary

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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

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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

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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.

Transcript

[Richard Saville Smith]

Hello, everybody.

[Marshall Poe]

This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Lan Le]

This is Black Barrel producer Lan Le, here to let you know that not all BBP episodes are syndicated on the New Books Network feed. To catch all of our episodes, you can subscribe directly wherever you get your podcasts. That's black, the color B E R Y L. Now onto the show.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Foreign.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Welcome to the Black Barrel, a podcast with intelligent conversations about Buddhism, Asian medicine and embodied spirituality. I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Salguero, a professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State's Abington College outside of Philadelphia. Today I sit down with Richard Saville Smith, an independent scholar of madness, religion and psychiatry. We discuss Richard's book, Acute Religious Experiences, which argues that frameworks for mad studies can get us out from under the academy's current habit of either pathologizing or sanitizing religious experiences. Along the way, we talk about the power struggle between psychiatry and the humanities, the influence of queer studies on Richard's work, and his reinterpretation of Jesus as a madman. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Barrel wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out our members only benefits on substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show. It's my pleasure to meet you. And thank you for taking the time, and on short notice, too, to join us.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Thank you for having me. And it's my pleasure entirely.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Why don't you just give us a three or four sentence introduction for the listeners to know who you are in terms of your academic affiliations and such.

[Richard Saville Smith]

I'm an old person there. I'm an old person already. But the I did I got my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2020. And the broadly speaking, what I've been interested in for the previous very many years is the relationship between psychiatry and religious experience and the whole area of madness which operates in the world of academia. There's now a thing called MAD studies, and MADS studies is I need to go into the whole detail of it right now. But it broadly finds itself in the lineage of feminism and critical race theory and LGBTQ of people who find that they have been ignored for too long and feel that it's important that their voices are also heard within the academic discourse. So that's what Mad Studies in a nutshell, does. And I'm part of that movement in the sense that I'm interested in how madness operates within the way that we understand and talk about religion and religious experience. So that's summary in personal terms, I live in Scotland. I now reside as an intentionally independent scholar by intentionally independent scholar. I'm not just unemployed, I choose to be unemployed. And I lived with my wife, who's disabled, and I'm her chief carer, and we live on the island of Skye and we live in beautiful, if sometimes rather wet part of the world. And it's fabulous. And so we're very happy here. I can go back and talk about many years ago and different things that I've done, but that's really what is of focus probably to tonight.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, sounds good. We can jump right in. So what caught my attention, the way I discovered you, was through your 2023 book, Acute Religious Experiences, Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies that was published with Bloomsbury academics. So that's where I first heard of you. And you are a little bit of an unusual guest for our particular podcast because we are focused on Asian religious traditions and medical traditions, and we tend to have on people who are specialists in those particular geographic and culturally specific traditions. But I thought even though you in your book are primarily working with Western texts, and so you're not necessarily referring to Buddhist or Taoist or other Asian traditions within your work as the primary focus. But for me, I was just really struck by your really interesting, provocative, and I think extremely important theoretical or critical intervention. And I wanted to engage in a conversation with you to see how we might take your insights and fold them into the inquiry that we've been doing on this podcast having to do with religious experiences coming out of Asian traditions. Just to explain to our listeners why somebody who's not necessarily an Asianist is on the podcast. I just wanted to really underscore the tremendous importance of the intervention that you're making with this book and with your work. So I'm looking forward to diving into all of that.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Absolutely. I would say that the way the book is structured is in kind of three parts. And the last part is an extended reading of Mark as a kind of case study. But the first part and the second part are setting up the Western religious studies discourse. And the second part is looking at the psychiatric discourse and comparing and contrasting these two things. But within the Western religious discourse, what I was doing or trying to do was to select writers who had written very broadly about religious experience, so that William James and Rudolph Otto and these guys are all writing about global experiences of religion. Although I've chosen Westerners to write about, the subject matter that they write about is global in its intentionality to a greater or lesser degree. And the flip side of that is that within psychiatry, the DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the main American framework for understanding psychiatric conditions, it still assumes a global relevance. So what you've got is you've got a set of readings, kind of progressive discourse over time, of Westerners writing for the Western religious studies discourse about global religions, contrasting with a psychiatric assumption that what psychiatry has got to say has global relevance. So 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 or religious tradition, and so on and so forth. So absolutely, I see myself as very much engaging in a global species wide engagement about how we talk about things. And you know, we'll go on to talk more about that.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

That's great. Your work, your critique and reinterpretation, reframing of religious experiences that you're doing in your own work is also explicitly framed as like a post colonial kind of intervention into the field. Right. So there's a lot to talk about here already. Why don't we just get out on the table of what the give us the abstract of the argument of the book on. On the whole. So there's these three parts. The first part is focused on religious studies discourse. The Second part is focused on psychiatry discourse. The third part is then. So in those two parts you develop a critique and a method that then you apply to the Gospel of Mark in part three, to give us an example of what that might look like in practice. So that's the structure.

[Richard Saville Smith]

The easy way into it is to understand a kind of power struggle between psychiatry and the humanities. And the power struggle between psychiatry and humanities begins with, arguably with Pinel, the bicyte back in the French Revolution times, and works forward from there. But let's not do the history of psychiatry, because I'm trying. I'm really not that interested in the history of psychiatry. What I'm interested in is the fact that psychiatrists have found it expedient to subvert, dismiss and eradicate the relevance of religious experience through their work and practice. And by diminishing it, they gain power because by diminishing religious experience, they effectively diminish the relevance of the way the church has understood religious experience. Or not just the church within Islam, within Hinduism, within, wherever, within Buddhism and whatever. Let all of these institutional, quote unquote archaic institutions have their own ideas of religious experience, which psychiatry can basically come along and paint over with a kind of whitewash of biomedical analysis which says, no, this is not because you saw God. This is because you suffer from abc and then they provide you with a set of diagnostic criteria that make that quote, unquote, rational interpretation of what actually happened. And what I found, and this is really the nub of the book, but for me was I found out when I went into it, was that scholars in the humanities were far too timid about taking on this analysis, so that they wanted to protect their subjects from the accusation of insanity. So when Eliade talks about the shaman, he does everything he can to make the shaman not mad. And I looked at this and thought, actually, what you're describing is, from a psychiatric point of view, completely bonkers. And it's not just shamanism. It works all the way through spirit possession. Everything gets the rough treatment. And what I was trying to do was to thread a needle through, find a more interesting way of journeying through the phenomenology of extraordinary experiences without allowing them to necessarily be diminished by psychiatry. So my book is an attempt to create a construct which I call an acute religious experience, which is necessarily mad but is not pathological. So it's mad, but not pathological. And that's what I'm trying to use to create, is to challenge the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry whilst allowing the phenomenological Reality of the creasing.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Great. So, yeah, so you're threading this needle between the pathologization that's happening in the psychiatric discourse, but then also the kind of sanitization that's taking place in the humanities discourse. Neither, 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. Is going to give us an alternative to those two reductive discourses and.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Exactly. And a new acceptance of the phenomenology of the crazy. So that if you read religious history, anyone's religious history, we can take the Buddha on here, we could take Muhammad on here, we can take Jesus on here. We can take. All of these people are involved in stuff that is not quote, unquote, normal. And once we get rid of ideas of normality and start looking instead, that one might see symptoms, one might say phenomenology or visions and voices and the role of visions and voices, then visions of voices become the determinant feature of a capacity to engage in an extraordinary reality.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Okay. And also, I feel like we should also put on the table a couple times, you've used words, you've said bonkers, you've said crazy, you're using the word mad. So I also want our listeners to know that you yourself identify as a mad person and very much have based this intervention on your own lived experience. And so I wanted you to get that on the table as well so that people understand where you're coming from with that.

[Richard Saville Smith]

No, no, I am a bonkers, crazy, mad person. As a bonkers, crazy mad person, I assert the right to use this language. And I'm not being rude. What I'm trying to do is to differentiate the way this experience is from normal positions. I get locked up in psychiatric hospitals. Psychiatrists tell me that I'm bipolar. I tell them that I don't really. I'm not really sure what their diagnosis means. I'm not really sure particularly about the depressive pulp, because I tend to be a bit on the high side rather than the downside when I'm mad. When I'm mad, it is absolutely something that I have no control over. It's not. It's not that I feel a bit off. It's that I'm fucking bonkers. And that's just like how it is. And when I get locked up, it doesn't particularly surprise me that society found me too difficult to deal with at that particular phase of what was what I was going through. And for me, that's all right, because it's. My dad was mad before me. His dad was mad for him. I embrace it as something that I am. I don't try and get healing from it. I don't try and get fixed. I accept it's something that I have to live with and certainly I can manage it. I can make it easier for myself because it's invariably pretty hardcore and quite painful and not something you would say, oh, let's go and do that for a weekend, because it didn't last a weekend. It can last for months. And I'll draw breath to say that one of the interesting things was I spent three months being mad in India, and I've been from the very top of Delhi to all the way down to Trivandrum, touring temples. Falls completely off my head.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Head.

[Richard Saville Smith]

And it was one of the most interesting three months of my life. But the trouble is, it wasn't easy. It wasn't a pleasant experience on the kind of happy holiday type thing, but it was something that still look back on and think, well, I'm sure glad I did that.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

In terms of the things that I'm aware of, you're fitting a little bit into the kinds of reclamation projects that you might have with, say, neurodivergence as a sort of an identity in a movement. I think the equivalence with queerness, I think, is pretty spot on. Right. Reclaiming a derogatory term and using that as a sort of an identity and as a field of inquiry and academic methodology as well. And I'm curious how you see more traditional kinds of terms. And I don't know what the local Scottish term would be for the historical term for the village seer or the wise woman or the shaman or the person. Okay, okay. Right. So how would you contrast or understand the relationship between the way that you're using the term mad to refer to somebody who has visions and so forth with, say, like, traditional idea of the Scottish seer?

[Richard Saville Smith]

The answer TO that is 100% about the way contemporary culture operates, which is a part of the problem with psychiatry, is that psychiatry has devalued all of these things, so that the seer is now just somebody who needs to be locked up. The last time I was in the hospital was actually the. It's just two years ago, and there was somebody who was absolutely a seer there, and their gift of seeing had been psychiatric diminished. So that what happens is that these traditions that you're talking about, these roles, which are traditional roles, have become victims of the actual epistemological change brought about by psychiatry.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

We've talked actually in previous episodes of this podcast about epistemological differences, epistemological pluralism, agnosticism, or multiplicity. So that's something that I think we're attuned to on this podcast as people who engage in all kinds of different Asian practices and so forth, and the kinds of worlds that those practices can open up to you and the kinds of. Kind of changes in your worldview and identity and so forth that can be experienced through those kinds of practices. So I think this is comfortable territory, maybe for most of our listeners to think in terms of a pluralism of worldviews, a pluralism of ontologies, epistemologies. I think at the same time, the way that these traditions are understood in the contemporary world, things like Buddhist meditation or kinds of other kinds of practices seem to perhaps be more prescribed in a certain way, that you'll undergo a meditation practice and you'll go through certain steps and stages that will transform your consciousness in such a way that you'll have such and such an experience. And it's all very planned out and very. Yeah, even rigid, even sometimes a little bit too fundamentalist in its. In its prescription. But it's all very, yeah, programmatic in a way that I think what you're talking about is a little bit different than that.

[Richard Saville Smith]

I mean, I think that the. There is this issue within my work, which I actually could take either way. It's something, you know, I'm pretty okay about either way, but I had to make a choice. And what I wanted to do was to keep. Put all of my stuff at the acute end of what we were talking about, which is why the book's called Acute Religious Experiences. So in that sense, I wouldn't necessarily be interested in talking about programmatic meditation practices because they're not acute enough for what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is this stuff that's crazy, this stuff that's irrational, this stuff that's un. Understandable, this stuff that doesn't make any sense to anyone, this stuff that nevertheless the subject can find themselves coming through and coming out the other side. Richer, wiser, more able to do things in this world. And that idea as a constructive engagement with the irrational at an acute level. It's what my book's about.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Great. Yeah, that. I think that's. I think that's really clear in situating us in what we're talking about here. And we've. Recently, the podcast has recently pivoted towards, I think I told you in the email, we've pivoted towards what has often been referred to as the dangers of religious practices or the unwanted side effects of religious practice is that that they might lead to psychotic episodes or they might lead to depression or anxiety or other kinds of. Other kinds of issues that are framed differently in different contexts. So you have, for example, you know, perhaps traditionally one might engage in certain kinds of practices precisely because they will result in spirit possession or visions of various types. But then you have modern practitioners engaging in those same practices in stress reduction context, maybe on a mindfulness class that they're doing by recommendation of their psychologist, and suddenly they're having the same experience. And then these might be characterized as unwanted side effects of those same practices. So there's a dichotomy that I've been exploring in my own research also between the way that these kinds of experiences are framed positively or negatively, either in traditional ways or in kind of modern clinical terminology. So anyway, I think we're very much swimming in the same waters here and yeah, I wanted to set the table for our listeners to understand where everything is plugging in.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Cool.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. So acute religious experiences. Why don't you give us a kind of a quick snapshot of what kinds of things you might be talking about There they are.

[Richard Saville Smith]

They are what psychiatrists would diagnose as schizophrenia, bipolar, that sort of thing. The trouble is that psychiatric language and what psychiatrists actually mean by schizophrenia and psychosis are, should we say, highly contested. It's not straightforward even in the world of psychiatry. But what I can say in direct answer to your question, because I did this thing in the book where I used to teach William James, James and William James's idea of mystical experiences which have. He has a kind of four part thing which I'm not sure if I can remember off the top of my head, but it goes something like passive, transient, noetic. And the other one which is.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, ineffable.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Ineffable.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

That's it.

[Richard Saville Smith]

You got it. And what I found was that when I was trying to write about mystical experiences, if you've never had a mystical experience is quite a difficult thing to do. But if you've got William James's four power structure, anybody can write about it. And so I thought, when I was writing my book, I thought, well, I'm going to do something like that so that there's something that people can actually hang on to. So I invented the idea and it was the tongue thoroughly in cheek of the dread Framework and the dread framework has D for diversity. I'm not going to run into all of these, I'm just going to run through them. Dread, D for diversity, R for religious, E for extreme, A for ambivalent, and D for determined. Okay, And I can talk about more of these more if you want or not later on. But the kind of, the most important one is like we've been circling around is this idea of extreme. 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 or whatever. And I know for myself, speaking for myself, when I'm saying I'm an atheist and when I am mad, I'm driven by the hand of God. And by being driven by the hand of God, what it is that you do things unreflectively. You do things because you have to do them. You do things because you have a sense of duty that is so overwhelming and so burdensome that the only way that you can move is in that direction. And it is that idea of extremity whereby the self reflective self is no longer a possibility in the world of acute religious experiences.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Do you have a distinction that you make between adaptive versus maladaptive, like pro social versus antisocial or in terms of the behaviors that you do when you're driven by the hand of God? Because I can imagine being driven by the hand of God and becoming an extremely effective and very globally celebrated spiritual teacher or something.

[Richard Saville Smith]

By the hand of. Driven by the hand of the devil.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, driven by the hand of God to do some things that, that would be socially, you know, frowned upon.

[Richard Saville Smith]

So the wholly contested territory, the answer is, my best example ever is my friend Tom and I in 1980 maybe taking LSD and I had the most incredible time and he had the most awful time. And it wasn't to do with the quality of the LSD because it was the same for both of us. It was just what happened to us. And it isn't a guilt or a blame thing. It is something to do with the way I was able to construct what was going on and the way he was able to construct what was going on and what happens to human beings that they could be good or bad, that they could be, you know, construct their experiences in pro social or antisocial ways is just really complicated. And it's to do with the psychosocial experience of what their life has been. And I don't see psychosis as necessarily being a bad thing. I think it depends how you engage with it, how you take it on. So in that sense, I don't think that there is a meaningful answer to the question. I think there is a diversity of responses, which includes all of the above.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

So you are doing something different, Right. You're taking this acute religious experience, and then instead of applying traditional interpretations or psychiatric interpretations or humanities interpretations, you're holding this up as. As a phenomenological experience that you want to describe phenomenologically and reframe it in terms of madness or in terms of the mad. Right?

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

So maybe I'll just ask you, then, kind of a succinct question. How does thinking of this phenomenology in those terms give us new insights, or how does it transform our thinking?

[Richard Saville Smith]

There are two answers to that. One answer is about the contemporary world, and one answer to that is about the historical analysis. A cultural analysis. Yeah. In the contemporary world, probably not a hell of a lot, because if I get taken to a psychiatric hospital and I say I'm having an acute religious experience, they're going to say, take these drugs. It's not going to persuade them. But the second part of the answer to your question is in terms of rereading the history of religious experience, what my argument does is to take away any need to be shy about madness, about the mad nature of experiences, so that we no longer need to cover up for the shaman. We no longer need to cover up for the extremes of holiness. We no longer need to cover up for this. We no longer need to, like, pretend that everything's okay and reasonable and rational and explicable and whatever. Instead, we can say, no, this is actually part of the process. And this part of the process is. Would be called. If it was being analyzed today, it would be called a psychiatric disorder. But we don't need to accept the pathologizing implications or the pathologizing insistence of that language. So we can say on the one, and this is back to your idea of pluralism. We can say, yes, there's a plurality here where we can accept that this might otherwise be called a psychiatric disorder. But no, it is not a psychiatric disorder, because look at the person's life. And the thing is that, like, what that has done has been to inflict a wrong. And what I'm seeking to do is to reset that power play and say, no, we can accept the phenomenological descriptions, but we don't accept the underlying diagnostic.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Assumption that you're Making, on the contrary, actually reframing madness as being an integral part of religious experience. Religious phenomenology. Yeah. So that strikes me as being relevant in the contemporary context in the sense of the kinds of experiences that I have been researching and that we've been talking about here on the podcast. People getting into acute religious experiences from or triggered by the practices that they're doing, intensive meditation retreats or intensive religious practices of various kinds, can provoke these kinds of experiences. And then we have the impulse to either pathologize, coming from the psychiatric side, or to sanitize, but not necessarily from the humanities perspective, but from this kind of religious perspective, or from the perspective of inside the spiritual community that this is. These experiences are, like we were saying earlier, they can be mapped, they can be sequenced, they can be controlled in some way, titrated in some way. And it seems that you're presenting us with a third alternative, which is in the process of having religious experiences, one can be quite mad. And that's neither necessarily controllable and titratable, nor necessarily a pathology that it can be both mad and sacred at the same time.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah. And just putting that out on the table there allows you to accept the diversity of how that all operates and so on and so forth. You know, what do you then do with this experience? Depends on your cultural context. And this is why I was quite interested in this idea of ambivalence and determination in my dread structure is the idea that the experience itself doesn't provide the end of the story. What provides the end of the story is how it is integrated into your life in a way that is meaningful to you, in a way that is meaningful to the cultural context in which you operate. And that integration process might involve a certain amount of doubt and a certain amount of uncertainty. And you have to push on through a process which extends beyond the experience itself.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. In my own research on people who have had what is often called the spiritual emergency, which is going beyond growth term. Yeah, yeah. That's the term that seems to be the term used by these spiritual communities. Often spiritual emergency is. It's a little bit more extreme than unwanted side effects. Right. I think probably you could call it a type of acute religious experience. And often people who are reporting having experienced spiritual emergencies are. It's an emergency precisely because there isn't a contextualization. There isn't a ready explanation. There isn't a map of this territory that kind of lays it out in step by step fashion that here's what it all means. These experiences Experiences are so extreme that people become rather destabilized by them. And the lack of context can lead to retrospectively assessing this as having been a very negative experience.

[Richard Saville Smith]

And it's this idea of the fact that things are madder than we want them to be, things are crazier and are more unmanageable than we want them to be. And people want. What you were saying earlier, a program or procedure or whatever. It was like that. And for everything that I'm saying is that when you're having an acute religious experience, you are not in control. You are not in a place where you're making decisions. You're not in a place where you're managing your own well being. You're out there doing stuff which is not normal and you get rid of your horrible normality. Leave me alone. Let me. And that's something that, when we bring it back into the academic discourse about this stuff, is that academics want to rationalize and they want to write papers that make sense like that. And the bits in the middle where everything's going off and nothing makes sense are difficult to capture in writing.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

I really like this tagline. You could say spirituality or religion is much madder than we want it to be. I think every meditation practitioner or spirituality practitioner should probably hang that on the wall of their practice space to constantly remind themselves that they are courting a type of experience that is potentially very much out of control and very much.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah, yeah. I think we should probably put the word in. Can be.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Can be.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah, can be. Along is the possibility without giving the.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Certainty of promise that it must be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That does seem to be the case. That for whatever reason, the way people, different people are configured or what have you, that some people engage in even just a light dosage of meditation or some practice and they have very strong experiences, maybe positive, maybe negative. And then other people may practice for decades and not really experience the.

[Richard Saville Smith]

But if you're willing to go that way. This is where psychiatry, then again is helpful because what psychiatry would say is that that person who is the light touch goes a long way, has a susceptibility.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah.

[Richard Saville Smith]

And the other person doesn't have a susceptibility because we're dealing with something that's innately human and innately bodily. And. And we'd like to talk about this for a second because it is this argument that says that schizophrenia is prevalent across the whole of the planet. And basically there's gene variation that makes the. Some people susceptible to what we now call schizophrenia. Okay. And I Reject the word schizophrenia. If you take away the word schizophrenia and replace that with acute religious experience, then the idea of a small number of people having this gene variation and taking it to the furthest corners of the planet is quite an interesting idea.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

We had a guest on a couple episodes ago, Miguel Farias, and he was citing some research on schizotype. So he's a researcher of altered states of consciousness and so forth, and he was talking about some research that was showing that people are higher or lower in schizotype. People have different reactions or responses to spiritual practices. And somebody that's high schizotype may very readily have experiences and somebody low schizotype, but would not.

[Richard Saville Smith]

But the reality is that if you accept that there is a genetic component to it, which is a kind of bodily aspect to it, then all of the things that you just said become so. But it also becomes the case that not everybody can be mad. Yeah. And I'm fine with that. But some people aren't because some people want everything to be a kind of like spectrum. They get that anybody could be mad. That just requires the correct circumstances. We could all dream up to relax. And there's an analogy that I use on that which I find persuasive, which is that if a hundred people are in a boat and the boat capsizes, then all of them are traumatized, but only some of them are psychotic. It's a thought experiment. I can't prove it, but I think that's just how it works, is that only some people have susceptibility to be mad, to have acute religious experiences. And I'm not that bothered if I was found to be wrong. It doesn't really matter to my argument, but I find it interesting because what it does is it allows you to have a better sense of a bodily diversity of humanity where humans really are genuinely diverse and we're not bound by normative ideas of humans. We are genuinely diverse.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. Again and again, the parallel with queer studies is clear, right, that you go, you move from a mentality where there's a norm, everything else is deviant, to a mentality where, you know, understanding that human beings sexuality is diverse and there's all kinds of different expressions of it. And we're saying the same thing here about maybe human beings capacities to engage with these religious experiences of various types. The difference between the two cases strikes me that there's a lot of attention paid within religious traditions, within also individual people's experiences when it comes to religious experiences of a certain degree of potency. People not always, but almost always create like a worldview or an ontology or some kind of world is created out of those experiences. And you said yourself, you were obviously just tongue in cheek that you're an atheist when you're saying and when you're mad, you said you were touched by the hand of God. I think most people that I talk to have had acute religious experiences or dramatic religious experiences, even if they weren't as acute as what you're describing, will often create an ontology out of the experience. You know, I had a near death experience and I saw this realm of angels. So therefore this realm of angels exists. Or I had a meditation experience in which I saw that everything was consciousness. So therefore consciousness is primary in the universe. They'll create an ontology out of the experience.

[Richard Saville Smith]

But do you not think that's because that's a reflection of the cultural context in which they are already situated? Because people who see angels already have angels as a possibility of seeing?

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, we had a guest on Josh Schrei who was talking about the angelic realms for the North American indigenous people. This particular group he was talking about, the angelic realms are inhabited by all of these sea creatures because that's the way that they see angels in that culture. So what you would see in that religious experience would be highly culturally determined, I think. So where do you stand then yourself on the status of these kinds of ontologies or these kinds of worlds that, that open up? So many people that I've talked to would say that they're seeing ultimate reality when they're having an acute religious experience. And that is what's actually true. Of course, psychiatry would say the opposite. Right. I was talking earlier about epistemological pluralism or agnosticism. How far down the agnostic road are you willing to come with me?

[Richard Saville Smith]

I'm willing to come with you a long way, all the way to the end. But the thing is that humans are more culturally located than they think they are.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

We talked a little bit about meditation, side effects and so forth as one example. But let's take the example of spirit possession. Actually have had two different episodes recently about spirit possession. One in which I talked about my own kind of experience and observation of possession rituals in Thailand, where I lived and trained as a practitioner of healing arts many years ago. And then we had Miguel Ferris, who I mentioned earlier was also on, talked a little bit about, about possession as well. But let's say, you know, somebody goes into a full possession meaning they've lost their own self consciousness. Some Something is acting through them. They're not present. They wake up 45 minutes, an hour later and don't remember what they've been doing for the last hour. They've acted in all kinds of erratic and unusual ways, let's say. And the community has an interpretation of this kind of ritual as being a blessing, that the spirits have come down into these people's bodies and have empowered them. The examples that I was talking about in the episode where I was sharing some stories from Thailand, that this is very much seen as being an empowerment for the community in order to make them healthier, in order to protect them from illnesses and so on. So the community has a very positive read of this. And the community values these people who can become possessed in that way. And then along come the kind of Western observers of this and the Western interpreters of this. And so on the humanities or social sciences side, we have, I don't know. Durkheim would say it's all about some kind of social function, and Freud would say it's all about some kind of repressed, I don't know, childhood, whatever. The psychiatrist might come along and say this is all some kind of mass psychosis, although because it's authorized within their community, the DSM has an exemption for it. And everybody would have a neat explanation for what's going on. So in that scene, in that milieu, Dr. Savo Smith takes the podium and says, hold on a second. I have a better interpretation of what's going on here. These people are mad. Not in a bad way, but.

[Richard Saville Smith]

No, I. I would say that these people are having an acute religious experience. Madness comes with its own baggage. And one wouldn't want to impose the baggage of the language of madness. It works for me in mad studies and whatever like that. Who can mock ourselves and take it like that? But I would use that language to somebody else. But acute religious experience, yes, that works okay. But not only would I do that, I would also remind them of the Pali idea of the elephant, that they're all partly right. This is, you know, this is the.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Elephant and the blind man who are all. Each touching a part of the elephant.

[Richard Saville Smith]

And these are. This is part of the gig. Is a function of the failure of Western academic, disciplinary organization that allows Dirk Hammond Freud to be put in conflict.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

So then your acute religious experience category, I mean, in a sense. Sense. It is an interdisciplinary category in the sense that you're situating between social sciences, psychiatry. You're both drawing on and critiquing and responding to and engaging with an Interdisciplinary range of.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah, politely, politely.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

But critically, I think mostly politely, the.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Politeness matters because, you know, it is in some ways, you know, an exercise in manners. What you're trying to do is to engage in things that have been in dispute for hundreds of years in the Western Academy, and like the Western Academy, needs to be cajoled into taking a more expansive view of things. And certain parts of it are. But the politeness matters because it's so easy for people to entrench themselves in disciplinary distance. But what my approach does is it puts people in the humanities in a position to read psychiatry and vice versa, and to talk about religion in the context which might be psychiatric and might be to do with anthropology. So in that sense, it's an invitation to people to read beyond their own disciplinary corners.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, brilliant. It certainly, I think, is extraordinarily successful in that kind of bridge building that you're talking about. I certainly learned a lot from reading it myself. So I'll just repeat. The title of the book is Acute Religious Experiences, Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. So what we haven't talked about is the third part of the book where you then take the methodology or take this concept and apply it to the Gospel of Mark. So I don't know how much our listeners are going to know about the Gospel of Mark. I know virtually nothing about Christianity. I don't necessarily think we need to get into the weeds of it, but just give us a sense of what you do with the Gospel of Mark and what's in the Gospel of Mark that's of interest to a study about acute religious experiences.

[Richard Saville Smith]

What it is is that without getting bogged down in it, again, it's a key illustration of psychiatry versus religion. Around the start of the 20th century, there was a concerted bunch of psychiatrists who wrote books like the Madness of Jesus. And they wanted to diminish, to reduce Jesus, to turn Jesus into a madman. Because by returning Jesus into madman, you got to basically destroy the church. And what I do with it is I take, 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? And the baptism is when Jesus goes into the Jordan and he comes out, out. And what happens? He sees visions and voices and the transfiguration where he goes up a hill and sees visions and voices. And it occurred to me that if you took these two incidents, you could reinterpret the life of Jesus in a way that was, well, novel, certainly, and interesting. Secondly, and if you see that in the context of. Of person standing on the top of a hill in transfiguration, knowing what has to happen next, then it's a straight line from there to the crucifixion. And the current way biblical scholarship deals with that is it's a muddied line full of contingency and chance. And it doesn't give credit to the vision that death is an acceptable outcome. And the thing is that I've taken. I take all of the facts, all of the evidence, as it were, but just insert intentionality. And being driven by the hand of God is intentionality. That's my chapter three.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

So your chapter isn't necessarily making a historical argument. It's more of like.

[Richard Saville Smith]

It's making a psychological argument.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

A psychological argument.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Right. It's making a mad argument. It's making an argument that says that madness matters.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

It's the same narrative, but placing power of the vision and the telos of the vision. Like once having had this vision.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

The mad person must enact it. That must fulfill the vision.

[Richard Saville Smith]

100.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. I was trying to see in my mind if there was any kind of parallel I wanted to draw to the Buddha or to any other. Any other Asian. Well, I certainly think. I certainly think the narrative of the Buddha's life with a crown prince and leaving his whole kingdom and his whole sort of luxurious life and going off into the forest.

[Richard Saville Smith]

He got off something going. For you to do that, it is.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

A kind of a mad. A madness of sorts. Right.

[Richard Saville Smith]

My sense about the Buddha is that he is absolutely in the world of acute religious experiences. The book kind of uses Jesus. He's like an example. It's like a case study. There are other case studies that could have been used. But the thing is that now I'm writing about, you know, I've really got myself into this whole kind of religion spirituality thing and consciousness and the whole kind of neuroscience world of predictive processing and so on and so forth. Like that just seemed to me to be a richer theoretical theme than trying to reread historical character. So I think that's where I'm at.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. So I was going to ask you, you know, what you're working on next, what you're turning to next.

[Richard Saville Smith]

So I'm fascinated by the idea of religion and spirituality because I think there's more to be written at a theoretical level about the relationship between religion, spirituality and consciousness. And by Consciousness. I presumably mean MAD consciousness as well, obviously. But the is to do with spirituality and the relationship to religion. And if you take the analogy of sexuality and gender, where sexuality is, as it were, innate. I'm not sure if that's the right word, but let's go with the. And gender is constructed. The idea of the parallel where spirituality is just part of the human condition and religion is the constructed aspect. I really quite like that idea that everybody is spiritual. How that manifests is culturally constructed. And it seems fairly simple on its surface. But once you get into that, then you have to talk about what the hell we mean by religion. And once you're into to what the hell we mean by religion, you're into classic religious studies territory of we might mean this, but it's actually much more complicated.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Isn't that the only thing we've talked about for the last hundred and some odd years?

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah. So I want to talk about it some more.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

How does MAD studies make a new intervention into that conversation? Presumably?

[Richard Saville Smith]

I don't know. I'm going to find out.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

I see. Okay, great. Well, so I always like to give our guests the opportunity to go back and say more about something or to say something about a topic I should have asked you about and didn't. Or anything else that's on your mind. Anything you want to add to the conversation. I want you to have the last word.

[Richard Saville Smith]

I think we covered a lot of ground. I hope some of it was useful.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, I. I think as we are just now starting into the topic of meditation, side effects and so on and so forth, I think just having this framing is really helpful for the conversation. Just to get us away from this dichotomy between pathologization or sanitization and really kind of allow the madness to be there and allow the uncertainty and the uncontrolled nature of these experiences to really not be a problem that needs to be explained away or diagnosed, but can actually be understood as a feature of religious practice and religious experience. And I think that's a really helpful framing. So thank you for sharing. Thank you for. Thank you writing a great book. Thanks for being here.

[Richard Saville Smith]

It's been a blast. Thank you very much for having me.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, wonderful. Good to meet you.

[Richard Saville Smith]

Yeah. And g.

[Lan Le]

That's it for today from us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us on one of our partner podcasts, you can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or like us up on Substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierce Algaro and produced and edited by me Lan Le. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time. Be happy, be safe and be well.

[Dr. Pierce Salguero]

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