Religion and mental illness

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Good share—I think I resonate with what you say.  Faith is a step into the crazy already, or potentially so, so if one is already crazy, it calls for, as I think you’re saying, rightly so, even more introspection. Another problem is that one’s religious community, also engaged in openness to the metaphysical, tends to be supportive or enabling of one’s mental-illness-fueled flights of delusion, ie, not keeping one foot in the mental illness side of the equation. In other words, one’s community (especially an evangelical/charismatic one—my situation) tends to err on the side of it being connection to the divine as opposed to pathological. 

It can also alienate oneself from a lot of (non-religious) people, which can worsen the illness. 

By the way, AA is a community which is both deeply spiritual even to the point of absolutely believing in things like temporal divine intervention, ie, mysticism, while at the same time keeping an eye on it and holding everything up to the rigorous real world lens of spiritual, mental, and physical health and well-being. 

So AA is not looking for, or supportive of, the Joan of Arc who has visions, leads their armies to victory, casts out the enemy, and then gets burned at the stake, which is something religions have shown themselves won’t to do. 

Having said all that, and given my own spiritual and religious journey, I still regard mystical/metaphysical experiences to be very comforting and supportive, eg, praying in tongues, hearing the voice of God, divine inspiration, prayer & meditation, even the gift of healing, but I still keep one foot in “maybe this is crazy” or “other people might think this is crazy” (Slavoj Žižek might term it “hysterical doubt”). Real is real, which means can it be proven by tests and experiments, and do other people think it’s real. Also, I tend to regard these spiritual things as personal, not something that others “have to believe” or I’ll cut them out of my life.