Spiritual experience and mental healthcare
One of the fastest growing special interest groups in the UK Royal College of Psychiatry is one on spiritual experience. This reflects growing interest in the idea of a spiritual life as a source of strength and protection for mental health. At the same time, religious experience itself can shared key features with psychopathological phenomena thus raising a question of the distinction between the two.
In their paper, Jackson and Fulford suggest that religious experience - and certainly the experience set out in the account of Simon - looks very much like psychotic experience meeting many PSE criteria. But whilst pathological psychotic experience undermines action, possibly even radically by undermining the formation of intentions, religious psychotic experience can enhance life and action, as it did Simon. But Marzanski and Bratton reject this attempt to locate (and domesticate) religious experience within a post-Enlightenment view. They say:
Although Jackson and Fulford are prepared to take each subject’s “beliefs and values” seriously, they do not seem to accord any significance to the referent of those experiences (God or some other external, spiritual agency), which is the very thing that the subject himself takes most seriously. Jackson and Fulford, in particular, explicitly bracket out theological categories as an aid to explanation, except insofar as they are used by the subject and those close to them (psychiatrists, priests, friends, relatives) to report the experience in question. Theological categories are significant for illustrative, rather than explanatory, purposes. Instead, the authors offer a form of methodological individualism whereby the experience of each subject is reduced to what the subject values or believes about the experience. Thus the statement of each subject to have had a spiritual encounter with someone or something “Other,” which is an ontological claim, is automatically reduced to a psychological claim.
This disagreement provides a helpful context to view Rashed's paper which considers both the nature of the putative experience alongside its harmful or beneficial subsequent effects without, apparently at least, appealing to the single tradition Marzanski and Bratton espouse. It seems as though Jackson and Fulford attempt to avoid any external endorsing or undermining view of the veracity of a putative spiritual experiences, Marzanski and Bratton assert a particular theological realism and Rashed attempts to hold that any and all views may be true.
Some slides are here.
Essential reading:
Rashed, M. A.(2010) ‘Religious Experience and Psychiatry: Analysis of the Conflict and Proposal for a Way Forward’ Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17(3), 185-204
Further reading:
Jackson, M. and Fulford, K.W.M. (1997) ‘Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology’ Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 4: 41-65
Marzanski, M., and Bratton, M. (2002) ‘Psychopathological Symptoms and Religious Experience: A Critique of Jackson and Fulford’ Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9: 359-371