Religious Experiences in the Context of Bipolar Disorder: Serious Pathology and/or Genuine Spirituality? A Narrative Review against the Background of the Literature about Bipolar Disorder and Religion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Literature about bipolar disorder and religion is scarce and primarily encompasses studies with a quantitative design. Results of such studies do not lead to unambiguous conclusions about the relation between bipolar disorder and religion that could be applied in clinical practice. The main focus of this article will be on the domain of religious experiences/religious delusions and hallucinations as explored in two recent PhD studies regarding mixed methods and qualitative research, conducted in the Netherlands and in Canada. In the narrative review of the two studies, the occurrence of different types of religious experiences and various explanatory models of patients to interpret them are presented. The interpretation of religious experiences, often related to mania, proves to be an intense quest, and often a struggle for many patients, whereby fluctuations in mood, course of the illness, religious or philosophical background, and the reactions of relatives and mental health professionals all play a role. Patients combine various explanatory models, both medical and religious/cultural, to interpret their experiences and these may fluctuate over the years. The two studies are placed in the context of literature about bipolar disorder and various aspects of religion to date. Finally, the challenges for future research and the implications for clinical practice will be outlined.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".