Mysterium tremendum fascinans
“How is it possible to persuade a psychiatrist that one is sane when in the midst of an overwhelming and ineffable experience of god?"
For background:
Acute Religious Experiences as a Way of Seeing Madness
Richard Saville-Smith has a PhD in religious studies from the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and he is an independent scholar who lives on the Isle of Skye at the edge of the world. Saville-Smith’s three careers began with and were punctuated by madness. After seeking out the low risk routines of business management in London, fo…
Two excerpts from Richard Saville-Smith’s book Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies:
A)
“But, deep into this book, I do want to write two things about madness as madness, as my madness, for the benefit of any psychiatrists who may stumble across these words:
1. Being mad is, for me, not the aberration, it is the more, the numinous, the Shamanic consciousness, the mystical experience, the reality beyond the model offered by the psychotomimetic/psychedelic experience. Madness is the peak experience. In quantitative terms madness is a small part of my life, in qualitative terms it is the most profound, the most important, the most eye-opening, mind-altering, liberating experience, like a light-bulb moment which can last for pain-filled weeks, too hot, too bright, too harsh. I am not not me when I am mad. I am the same person, living the same life but with the costs and benefits of riding a wave of immediacy over which the only control I seek is to go higher. The reason mad people, like me (I speak for myself, but I know I’m not alone), are forcibly detained is because, in contrast with all other ‘medical’ patients, I am impatient, I don’t want to be helped or cured, I don’t want to be interrupted.
2. Speaking even more personally, when the psychiatric system trips me up and intervenes for the benefit of myself or others, I understand their good intentions. But what they don’t know is that when they lock me up, I make myself sane – in order to escape – and, and this is the key point, in pretending to be sane I become sane. This pretence is exhausting. I adopt routines, but not rigidly, ritually or obsessively – an afternoon nap, an evening bath (they don’t know whether I sleep or bathe). I walk instead of running, I sit where I can be seen, pretending to read a book, as the words bleed down the page, I eat my meals at mealtime and ask the staff to compliment the chef, I play chess by sticking to the rules, I hold my tongue and I do not rise to provocation. These strategies are not some product of autopoesis, although I learned much from my cumulative experiences; my strategic insight came from observing my dad. He went manic annually, with the October gales, and pumped full of antipsychotics…