'Demonic possession is real and victims seeking exorcism should not be ignored'

Religious nuts can get into Uni as well.

How does he test for demonic possession verus mental illness?

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Strongly religious person with a vested interest in this area see's(but naturally has no evidence of) weird phemonema shocker.

A big issue I'd imagine is that religious people with mental health issues can potentially view them as possession and behave accordingly in a subconscious fashion.
 
Meh..

The truth is boring. Thats why people choose to believe in ghosts, demons, and stuff like that.
 
Strongly religious person with a vested interest in this area see's(but naturally has no evidence of) weird phemonema shocker.

A big issue I'd imagine is that religious people with mental health issues can potentially view them as possession and behave accordingly in a subconscious fashion.

An excerpt of the second article I linked:

Dr. Neil Martin is chief of neurosurgery at the UCLA Medical Center. He has performed more than 5,000 brain surgeries and is regularly cited as in the top 1 percent of his specialty. On August 3, I showed him the video of Rosa’s exorcism. This is his response: “Absolutely amazing. There’s a major force at work within her somehow. I don’t know the underlying origin of it. She’s not separated from the environment. She’s not in a catatonic state. She’s responding to the priest and is aware of the context. The energy she shows is amazing. The priest on the right is struggling to control her. He’s holding her down, as are the others, and the sweat is dripping off his face at a time when she’s not sweating. This doesn’t seem to be hallucinations. She appears to be engaged in the process but resisting. You can see she has no ability to pull herself back.”

I asked Dr. Martin if this was some kind of brain disorder. “It doesn’t look like schizophrenia or epilepsy,” he said. “It could be delirium, an agitated disconnection from normal behavior. But the powerful verbalization we’re hearing, that’s not what you get with delirium. With delirium you see the struggling, maybe the yelling, but this guttural voice seems like it’s coming from someplace else. I’ve done thousands of surgeries, on brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, ruptured brain aneurysms, infections affecting the brain, and I haven’t seen this kind of consequence from any of those disorders. This goes beyond anything I’ve ever experienced—that’s for certain.”

I also showed the video to Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon and clinical specialist in epilepsy surgery, seizure disorder, and the study of human memory. He is based at both UCLA and the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. This was his conclusion: “It looks like something authentic. She is like a caged animal. I don’t think there’s a loss of consciousness or contact, because she’s in contact with the people. She appears to respond to the people who talk to her. It’s a striking change in behavior. I believe everything originates in the brain. So which part of the brain could serve this type of behavior? The limbic system, which has to do with emotional processing of stimuli, and the temporal lobe. I don’t see this as epilepsy. It’s not necessarily a lesion. It’s a physiological state. It seems to be associated with religious things. In the temporal lobe there’s something called hyper-religiosity. You probably won’t have this in somebody who has no religious background. Can I characterize it? Maybe. Can I treat it? No.”

I asked Dr. Fried if he believed in God, and he took a long pause before answering: “I do believe there is a limit to human understanding. Beyond this limit, I’m willing to recognize an entity called God.”

The reaction of the neurosurgeons took me by surprise. I had expected they would quickly dismiss Rosa’s symptoms as madness or unintentional fraud or suggest that she might be cured by brain surgery. They did not.

They wouldn’t come out and say, “Of course this woman is possessed by Satan,” but they seemed baffled as to how to define her ailment, and both agreed it was not something they would attempt to cure with surgery.

I was eager to pursue another path, one devoted to the treatment and prevention of mental disorder. I took the video to a group of some of the leading psychiatrists in the country, all in residence at Columbia University: Jeffrey Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute; Michael B. First, professor of clinical psychiatry; Roberto Lewis-Fernández, president-elect of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry; and Ryan Lawrence, M.D., assistant professor of clinical psychiatry.

After showing the Columbia psychiatrists the video on a 36-inch screen, they had an open discussion about it for an hour and a half. Here are some of the highlights synthesized from that discussion:

LIEBERMAN: To be perfectly blunt, this is unconvincing as to anything that could be supernatural or excused from the laws of nature as we know them.

ME: Do you think it’s fraud?

ALL: No, no, it’s something real.

FIRST: It fits recognized psychiatric syndromes that have been defined. It’s classic. I would say she fits into the pattern that we call Dissociative Trance and Possession Disorder. There is no obvious known psychopathology. Exorcism as a therapeutic technique could work.

LIEBERMAN: Given our scientific and medical backgrounds, do we countenance the possibility of there being something that’s spiritual or supernatural in nature that takes the form of disturbed behavior?

LEWIS-FERNÁNDEZ: The person is expressing a pathology that is understood as possession. Our field of psychiatry can understand it as possession just on the virtue of what she’s presenting, without having to take any kind of stance on whether there actually are demons, spirits. [Dr. Lewis-Fernández worked on adding the word “possession” to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, relied upon by clinicians, researchers, and the legal system.]

LAWRENCE: I have a patient now in my unit who’s similar to this in some ways. She says she’s possessed by the Devil. She speaks in a bizarre voice. She has a history of trauma. What we’re doing for her is we’re treating her with medication, giving her psychotherapy, creating a safe environment. She gets better. We don’t take a position of “Is this really Satan bothering you or are you just being bothered by your illness?”

LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis. “Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.

ME: Do you completely disregard the idea of possession?

LIEBERMAN: No. There was no way I could explain what happened. Intellectually, I might have said it’s possible, but this was an example that added credence.

ME: If a patient doesn’t believe in psychiatry, has some resistance to it, is it likely to work?

LIEBERMAN: If you’re saying you need to believe in religious systems for something like exorcism to work, the answer is yes. In sum, this isn’t demon possession, but treating Rosa’s symptoms as demon possession may not be the worst thing.

FIRST: I think all of us would agree there are things we can’t explain.

I went to these doctors to try to get a rational, scientific explanation for what I had experienced. I thought they’d say, “This is some sort of psychosomatic disorder having nothing to do with possession.” That’s not what I came away with. Forty-five years after I directed The Exorcist, there’s more acceptance of the possibility of possession than there was when I made the film.
 
De-moronic possession imo
 
Demonic possessions are absolutely real. There is a whole another world hidden from our sight. Whether someone believes or not is irrelevant.
 
An excerpt of the second article I linked:

Dr. Neil Martin is chief of neurosurgery at the UCLA Medical Center. He has performed more than 5,000 brain surgeries and is regularly cited as in the top 1 percent of his specialty. On August 3, I showed him the video of Rosa’s exorcism. This is his response: “Absolutely amazing. There’s a major force at work within her somehow. I don’t know the underlying origin of it. She’s not separated from the environment. She’s not in a catatonic state. She’s responding to the priest and is aware of the context. The energy she shows is amazing. The priest on the right is struggling to control her. He’s holding her down, as are the others, and the sweat is dripping off his face at a time when she’s not sweating. This doesn’t seem to be hallucinations. She appears to be engaged in the process but resisting. You can see she has no ability to pull herself back.”

I asked Dr. Martin if this was some kind of brain disorder. “It doesn’t look like schizophrenia or epilepsy,” he said. “It could be delirium, an agitated disconnection from normal behavior. But the powerful verbalization we’re hearing, that’s not what you get with delirium. With delirium you see the struggling, maybe the yelling, but this guttural voice seems like it’s coming from someplace else. I’ve done thousands of surgeries, on brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, ruptured brain aneurysms, infections affecting the brain, and I haven’t seen this kind of consequence from any of those disorders. This goes beyond anything I’ve ever experienced—that’s for certain.”

I also showed the video to Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon and clinical specialist in epilepsy surgery, seizure disorder, and the study of human memory. He is based at both UCLA and the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. This was his conclusion: “It looks like something authentic. She is like a caged animal. I don’t think there’s a loss of consciousness or contact, because she’s in contact with the people. She appears to respond to the people who talk to her. It’s a striking change in behavior. I believe everything originates in the brain. So which part of the brain could serve this type of behavior? The limbic system, which has to do with emotional processing of stimuli, and the temporal lobe. I don’t see this as epilepsy. It’s not necessarily a lesion. It’s a physiological state. It seems to be associated with religious things. In the temporal lobe there’s something called hyper-religiosity. You probably won’t have this in somebody who has no religious background. Can I characterize it? Maybe. Can I treat it? No.”

I asked Dr. Fried if he believed in God, and he took a long pause before answering: “I do believe there is a limit to human understanding. Beyond this limit, I’m willing to recognize an entity called God.”

The reaction of the neurosurgeons took me by surprise. I had expected they would quickly dismiss Rosa’s symptoms as madness or unintentional fraud or suggest that she might be cured by brain surgery. They did not.

They wouldn’t come out and say, “Of course this woman is possessed by Satan,” but they seemed baffled as to how to define her ailment, and both agreed it was not something they would attempt to cure with surgery.

I was eager to pursue another path, one devoted to the treatment and prevention of mental disorder. I took the video to a group of some of the leading psychiatrists in the country, all in residence at Columbia University: Jeffrey Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute; Michael B. First, professor of clinical psychiatry; Roberto Lewis-Fernández, president-elect of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry; and Ryan Lawrence, M.D., assistant professor of clinical psychiatry.

After showing the Columbia psychiatrists the video on a 36-inch screen, they had an open discussion about it for an hour and a half. Here are some of the highlights synthesized from that discussion:

LIEBERMAN: To be perfectly blunt, this is unconvincing as to anything that could be supernatural or excused from the laws of nature as we know them.

ME: Do you think it’s fraud?

ALL: No, no, it’s something real.

FIRST: It fits recognized psychiatric syndromes that have been defined. It’s classic. I would say she fits into the pattern that we call Dissociative Trance and Possession Disorder. There is no obvious known psychopathology. Exorcism as a therapeutic technique could work.

LIEBERMAN: Given our scientific and medical backgrounds, do we countenance the possibility of there being something that’s spiritual or supernatural in nature that takes the form of disturbed behavior?

LEWIS-FERNÁNDEZ: The person is expressing a pathology that is understood as possession. Our field of psychiatry can understand it as possession just on the virtue of what she’s presenting, without having to take any kind of stance on whether there actually are demons, spirits. [Dr. Lewis-Fernández worked on adding the word “possession” to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, relied upon by clinicians, researchers, and the legal system.]

LAWRENCE: I have a patient now in my unit who’s similar to this in some ways. She says she’s possessed by the Devil. She speaks in a bizarre voice. She has a history of trauma. What we’re doing for her is we’re treating her with medication, giving her psychotherapy, creating a safe environment. She gets better. We don’t take a position of “Is this really Satan bothering you or are you just being bothered by your illness?”

LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis. “Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.

ME: Do you completely disregard the idea of possession?

LIEBERMAN: No. There was no way I could explain what happened. Intellectually, I might have said it’s possible, but this was an example that added credence.

ME: If a patient doesn’t believe in psychiatry, has some resistance to it, is it likely to work?

LIEBERMAN: If you’re saying you need to believe in religious systems for something like exorcism to work, the answer is yes. In sum, this isn’t demon possession, but treating Rosa’s symptoms as demon possession may not be the worst thing.

FIRST: I think all of us would agree there are things we can’t explain.

I went to these doctors to try to get a rational, scientific explanation for what I had experienced. I thought they’d say, “This is some sort of psychosomatic disorder having nothing to do with possession.” That’s not what I came away with. Forty-five years after I directed The Exorcist, there’s more acceptance of the possibility of possession than there was when I made the film.

The evidence is basically a women putting on a deep voice and people getting headaches? I'm convinced.

Again as I said one thing you cannot discount is that people who personally believe in possession and suffer mental illness will potentially act out(such as putting on a deep voice) according to it, even if its perhaps on a more subconious level. Just as expected you have a strongly catholic family who believed in possession in one of these cases.

Even medical professionals are obviously not above superstition if placed in the right environment.
 
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Demonic possession is very real, and will continue to increase.
 
Attributing undefined or unexplained phenomena to milennia-old beliefs regarding the unproven edicts of transcendence and the existence of alternate intelligences rarely provides any sort of solution.

But, then again, neither does creating a jargon-esque term for that phenomena and declaring "case closed" while ignoring the indicators of any explanation out of hand simply due to personal/professional dogma.
 
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Lol it's all fake. Demons, ghosts, the devil, Casper, etc, they are all made up along with the traditional 'god'.

The truth Is, none of that exists. Only the people who choose to believe in religion - mainly Christianity - are the ones who are susceptible to 'possession'. It is all in their head. None of it is actually real.


Somebody said this already, but the fact is that the truth is actually boring - which is why we often like to believe in these fake phenomenas. We as humans have too much time on our hands compared to every other species on the planet. This extra time can leave us bored, which is why we feel the need to spice things up a notch.


It only goes as far as your imagination. Nothing wrong with that.
 
Demonic possessions are absolutely real. There is a whole another world hidden from our sight. Whether someone believes or not is irrelevant.
ease off, those noises you hear in the night are just me wanking in your cupboard.
 
Of course they are real!

The general public just calls them liberals.
 
Yea, but you have to have your exorcism done by the lizard people or it won’t really work.
 
All I will say is anyone that believes in this sort of stuff should be banned from being in a position of power or importance.

If I'm about to board my flight and I overhear the pilot talking about how his buddy was possessed and needed an exorcism, I'm calling him a retard and rescheduling my flight with a different airline.
 
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