Psychotic Experiences, Religion, and Spirituality

This conference is centered on reported or observed psychotic experiences and discusses the ways in which religious and spiritual idioms are mobilized by patients, as well as by medical and psychological practitioners and religious healers in their therapeutic relations. Overall, the conference covers a significant variety of social, institutional and cultural contexts. As an expected result, we should be able to better understand the ways in which culture and social institutions contribute to the shaping of individual psychotic experience, and how they create dynamics of integration and exclusion. In addition, by inviting social scientists and medical practitioners to confront their perspectives, we would like to question what appears to be the underlying constructivist stance on many recent perspectives on religious experience and spirituality linked to psychotic states