Sweet Delight and Endless Night: A Qualitative Exploration of Ordinary and Extraordinary Religious and Spiritual Experiences in Bipolar Disorder

ABSTRACT

The authenticity of religious and spiritual experiences during mania is an important subject for bipolar patients. The exploration of such experience in bipolar disorder is the central point of this qualitative study. A psychiatrist and a hospital chaplain conducted 35 semi-structured interviews with recovered participants, recruited from mental health care institutions in the Netherlands, the patients’ association and via the internet, about their religious and spiritual experiences during illness episodes and in stable times. A variety in types (such as divine presence, unity, mission, meaningful synchronicity) during mania was reported, which were on a sliding scale with experiences/views in stable times in more than half of the interviews. During depression, absence of religious or spiritual experience was predominant. The reported experiences were viewed by most participants as both authentically religious or spiritual but also related to the disorder, requiring therefore language that transcended medical terminology. Also indicated is the relevance of the results for fundamental discussions about the nature or religious experience.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the assistance of Kwok Wong, Dirk Kwakkel, Charissa van Kesteren, and Joke Meeuse, trainees in psychiatry, with the interviews; Joep de Geer and Arjan Lelivelt for their supportive commentary on the text; and of Elizabeth Harding with the English version of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ The variables ‘religious person’ and ‘spiritual person’ in GSS 2016 were computed as in Dutch research in the sociology of religion ‘God in Nederland, (GiN)’ [God in the Netherlands] (Bernts & Berghuijs, 2016), to attain a fourfold r/s typology: ‘religious nor spiritual,’ ‘only religious,’ ‘only spiritual,’ and ‘religious and spiritual.’

² Registration numbers of the two committees, respectively.

³ Lundmark (2010), in a case study of a patient with cancer who saw an apparition of Christ, carefully examined different psychological explanations for this vision. An important question for clinical practice is how to communicate such explanations in a way that the patient feels respected.