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Chapter 16 - Religion and Religious Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2022

By
Christopher C. H. Cook
Edited by
Christopher C. H. Cook  and
Andrew Powell
Christopher C. H. Cook
Affiliation:
Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University
Andrew Powell
Affiliation:
Formerly Warneford Hospital and University of Oxford
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Summary

The vast majority of people worldwide are religious, but religions are enormously diverse. Psychiatric research has attended more to the paths that people take in pursuit of the special things that religion represents than it has to religion itself. Religion is generally supportive of good mental health, and facilitates coping with illness and adversity, but religious and spiritual struggles (e.g., anger towards God, demonic attributions, religious conflicts, guilt and doubt) can impair mental well-being. Religious experiences, both positive and negative, can be mistaken for psychopathology and therefore need to be taken into account in diagnosis, but a differential diagnosis between spiritual/religious experience and mental disorder is not always helpful. It is possible both to be having a meaningful religious experience and to be suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder. Good clinical practice requires an ability to talk with patients in a sensitive and respectful way about their religious concerns.

Keywords

diagnosisreligionreligiosityreligious experiencespiritual/religious struggles
Type
Chapter
Information
Spirituality and Psychiatry , pp. 312 - 331
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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