This week, Richard Saville-Smith joins Kelly and John to talk about his book Acute Religious Experiences – Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

Saville-Smith is an independent researcher who focuses on the intersection of madness, mental disorders, and acute religious experiences, from a mad studies perspective. He earned his PhD in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2020.

They discuss the relatively little-known academic field of mad studies - which seeks to destigmatize and depathologize the concept of madness - and how the fields of psychiatry and religious studies, often operating in conflict with one another, have distorted our understanding of the authenticity of acute religious experiences like the ones described in the lives of Joan of Arc or Jesus.

Richard is on Bluesky @dranamorphosis