The Physiology of Faith by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Possession by Spirits and Demons

In 2011, Dr. Kazuhiro Tajima-Pozo and his colleagues from the Department of Psychiatry at San Carlos Hospital in Madrid reported the case of an unmarried 28-year-old woman who was being treated for schizophrenia.

The woman first began hearing voices at the age of 22, during a trip to the Canary Islands. She said that on one occasion an invisible being had pushed her down the stairs. She also reported that the spirit had repeatedly entered her room and sexually assaulted her, rolled her around in bed, and made her vomit. At the time, she was admitted to a hospital, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and started on medication.

A month later, her condition worsened again and her medication was adjusted.

A year and a half later, she was hospitalized again after throwing herself from a height at an airport in response to a voice she heard in her head. On another occasion, she was hospitalized after discontinuing her medication and using cannabis.

Overall, her symptoms proved resistant to treatment and never completely disappeared. She herself believed that half of her symptoms were caused by a mental disorder and the other half by the presence of an evil spirit. Through a website, she contacted a priest who was known as an expert in exorcism and who had appeared on television programs dealing with paranormal phenomena. He performed eight exorcism sessions on her. She said that after the sessions she slept more easily and felt calmer.

Her family, however, distrusted the exorcism sessions because during them she would scream, writhe, and sometimes vomit. They asked her doctors to speak with the priest. The treatment team asked him to explain the woman's mental condition to her and persuade her to focus solely on her medical treatment. The priest disappointed the treatment team: he maintained his belief that the woman was possessed by an evil spirit. [1]

Schizophrenia affects a person's thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Its symptoms may sometimes be severe and at other times mild. They may come and go, and they do not appear in exactly the same way in every patient. One symptom that may emerge when the illness becomes more severe is hallucination: a person may hear, see, smell, taste, or feel things that other people do not perceive.

Auditory hallucinations may involve one or several voices whispering or speaking to the person, or giving him instructions. These commands may be delivered angrily and insistently and may tell him to perform particular actions.

In visual hallucinations, a person may see lights, objects, or people—often people he loved who are no longer alive. Visual hallucinations may sometimes also interfere with his perception of distance.

Olfactory and gustatory hallucinations may lead a person to believe that someone is trying to poison him.

Tactile hallucinations may create the sensation that a hand is moving across his body or that insects are crawling over his skin.

Sometimes a person may believe that he has been possessed by a spirit or demon.

Other possible symptoms include social withdrawal, intense emotional reactions, diminished ability to experience pleasure, disorganized speech, reduced responsiveness to events in the surrounding environment, loss of motivation and emotional expression, difficulty concentrating, and problems with short-term memory.

Schizophrenia occurs in about one percent of the world's population and is more common in men. [2]

In the 1990s, Paul Chadwick and Max Birchwood conducted a study of 26 patients with schizophrenia, all of whom experienced auditory hallucinations that had persisted despite medication. All of these patients regarded the beings or entities behind the voices as omnipotent and omniscient. Some, however, perceived the source of the voice as benevolent and well-intentioned, while others regarded it as malevolent and hostile. Some believed the voice belonged to Satan; others believed it was the voice of God.

One of the patients was a 34-year-old woman of Iranian origin who said that she received instructions from Masumeh, the sister of the eighth Shiite Imam, concerning ordinary aspects of her daily life, such as trying new methods of cooking, deciding when to change her baby's diaper, or how to please her husband. Her visual hallucinations disappeared with medication, but her auditory hallucinations persisted. Eventually, however, after 18 weeks of cognitive therapy, she improved considerably and was able to return to work.

Another patient was a 59-year-old woman who heard the voice of God telling her to kill herself, her family, or one of her colleagues. At times, the voice accused other people of being Satan and told her not to speak to them. In her visual hallucinations, she saw her deceased daughter and her dog coming to her at night and urging her to obey God's commands so that she could join them in heaven. [3]

In past centuries, people who displayed such symptoms were often believed to be under the control of demons or other supernatural beings, and prayers and special rituals were used in attempts to drive the evil spirits from their bodies. The claims made by the person experiencing schizophrenia, together with the explanations offered for such phenomena by religious texts and religious authorities, could convince others that a supernatural being had truly possessed their loved one or was tormenting them. Family members, suffering greatly from the patient's behavior and seeing no other solution, might then seek help from other supernatural powers in the hope of overcoming what they believed to be a supernatural force. In this way, the hallucinatory symptoms of schizophrenia could be interpreted, both by the patient and by those around them, as direct evidence for the existence of the supernatural beings described in their religion.

Several factors are known to contribute to the development of schizophrenia, one of which is heredity. Among the most important medications used to treat the disorder are drugs that block dopamine receptors, since alterations in dopamine signaling are associated with symptoms of schizophrenia. Neural systems involving the neurotransmitters glutamate and GABA also show alterations in schizophrenia.