Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Different “Religious Experience vs Psychopathology” DistinctionsAwais Aftab, MD (bio)Mohammed Rashed’s analysis of the distinction between “religious experience” and “psychopathology” challenges the assumptions that underlie traditional efforts to make such a distinction and he arrives at a provocative and memorable conclusion: “The distinction between religious experience and mental disorder can only be invoked from a secular standpoint but can only be clarified from a religious standpoint. In other words: if you have the grounds to invoke it, you cannot have the tools to clarify it; and if you have the tools to clarify it, you do not have the grounds to invoke it” (Rashed, 2024). (For another recent discussion that challenges underlying assumptions of this dichotomy, see Gipps and Clark (2024) on the distinction between religious delusion and religious belief.)There is great merit in Rashed’s analysis, and I am in agreement with many aspects of the discussion. In particular, I admire Rashed’s ability here, as well as elsewhere (Rashed, 2021), to break the impasse of definitional debates by deconstructing and destabilizing the distinctions involved. In this commentary I’d like to note some points of disagreement and qualification that I hope can move Rashed’s analysis forward in a constructive way.The first thing I want to bring up is that Rashed defines religious experience very broadly: “Psychological distress or anomalous experience that has a religious origin, content, or end (purpose).” This effectively turns the distinction between religious experience and psychopathology into an instance of the general distinction between the religious worldview and the secular worldview. “Mental disorder” is understood by Rashed to be an exclusively secular concept. I am not sure this way of framing the dichotomy is entirely correct. If our notion of “religious experience” include any anomalous experiences believed to serve a religious purpose, then Rashed is correct that for the religious no anomalous experience would be excluded. And if “mental disorder” requires giving up on the idea of a divine purpose for our [End Page 211] suffering, then indeed the religious do not have the grounds to invoke it.I’d suggest that a better approach may be to think of two different “religious experience vs psychopathology” distinctions, one within the context of the religious worldview and one within the context of the secular worldview. Both are fuzzy and present demarcation problems of their own; both can be and ought to be destabilized.Rashed recognizes that the religious worldview does make space for illness and disease; it’s just that he says even these concepts are understood within a broader religious view of suffering:the proposal is not that religious traditions have no category of distress that is somatic in nature—of course they do—but that even with those categories, religion is never far off the horizon and will make an appearance at some point, if not in the origin or content of distress, then in terms of its broader purpose and so the recommended interventions.(Rashed, 2024, pp. 201)A vital implication of this is that the distinction between religious experience and a secular view of somatic illness would pose the same problem as the distinction between religious experience and mental illness; the religious would not have grounds to invoke it, for no illness is devoid of religious significance. And yet, the religious do meaningfully talk of “illnesses” and “diseases,” and they do meaningfully talk of “madness” (if not mental illness), and many often do meaningfully differentiate between madness and mysticism. This shows that the religious worldview has its own notions of disease and psychopathology, which differ from their secular counterparts in the sense that suffering involved is imbued with a divine purpose. The religious scholars interested in differentiating between the anomalous nature of the mystical experience and the anomalous nature of madness are interested, in part, in marking out abnormalities of thought and behavior so severe that they come to resemble the effects of somatic illness. Madness is where the internal coherence of the mystical experience breaks down, and becomes an instance of suffering at par with somatic illness.The secular worldview recognizes the phenomenology of religious experience—there is religious or mystical content—but...