Learn about the true story that inspired the movie "The Exorcist". Doctors, perhaps, like Gallagher. Gallagher says the concept of possession by spirit isn't limited to Catholicism. Muslim, Jewish and other Christian traditions regard possession by spirits -- holy or benign -- as possible. Mark Albanese is among them. A friend of Gallagher's, Albanese studied medicine at Cornell and has been practicing psychiatry for decades.
In a letter to the New Oxford Review, a Catholic magazine, he defended Gallagher's belief in possession. He also says there is a growing belief among health professionals that a patient's spiritual dimension should be accounted for in treatment, whether their provider agrees with those beliefs or not. Some psychiatrists have even talked of adding a "trance and possession disorder" diagnosis to the DSM, the premier diagnostic manual of disorders used by mental health professionals in the US.
There's still so much about the human mind that psychiatrists don't know, Albanese says. Doctors used to be widely skeptical of people who claimed to suffer from multiple personalities, but now it's a legitimate disorder dissociative identity disorder. Many are still dumbfounded by the power of placebos, a harmless pill or medical procedure that produces healing in some cases.
Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia, arrived at a similar conclusion after he had an unnerving experience with a patient. Lieberman was asked to examine the videotape of an exorcism that he subsequently dismissed as unconvincing. Then he met a woman who, he said, "freaked me out.
Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, says he and a family therapist were asked to examine a young woman who some thought was possessed. He and his colleague tried to treat the woman for several months but gave up because they had no success. The film "The Rite" is based on the life of the Rev. Gary Thomas, one of the leading exorcists in the US. Something happened during the treatment, though, that he still can't explain.
After sessions with the woman, he says, he'd go home in the evenings, and the lights in his house would go off by themselves, photographs and artwork would fall or slide off shelves, and he'd experience a piercing headache.
When he mentioned to this to his colleague one day, her response stunned him: She'd been having the exact same experiences. The tragic case of the real 'Emily Rose'. If you want to know why so many scientists and doctors like Lieberman are cautious about legitimizing demonic possession, consider one name: Anneliese Michel. Michel was a victim in one of the most notorious cases of contemporary exorcism. If you have the stomach for it, go online and listen to audiotapes and watch videos of her exorcisms.
The images and sounds will burn themselves into your brain. It sounds like somebody dropped a microphone into hell. Michel was a German Catholic woman who died of starvation in after 67 exorcisms over a period of nine months. She was diagnosed with epilepsy but believed she was possessed. So did her devout Roman Catholic parents. She reportedly displayed some of the classic signs of possession: abnormal strength, aversion to sacred objects, speaking different languages.
Learn about Anneliese Michel. But authorities later determined that it was Michel's parents and two priests who were responsible for her death.
German authorities put them on trial for murder, and they were found guilty of negligent homicide. One of the leading skeptics of exorcism -- and one of Gallagher's chief critics -- is Steven Novella, a neurologist and professor at Yale School of Medicine. He wrote a lengthy blog post dissecting Gallagher's experience with Julia, the satanic priestess. It could be read as a takedown of exorcisms everywhere. He says Julia probably performed a "cold reading" on Gallagher.
It's an old trick of fortune tellers and mediums in which they use vague, probing statements to make canny guesses about someone. Fortune teller: "I see a recent tragedy in your family. How did you know? Or take the case of a person speaking an unfamiliar language like Latin during a possession. Did they understand Latin spoken to them? Or did they just speak Latin? Learn why Novella thinks exorcisms are fake. It is important to note that demonic possession is not the automatic explaination for unexplained behavior.
Typically those viewed as "possessed" were merely afflicted by some mental condition unknown or untreated. In addition, exorcism is not the desired treatment. One of the attractions of late has been live exorcisms and the casting out of devils or demons from controlled persons. The subject matter and the theatrics of such things have brought some confusion among professing Christians, and have raised questions and concerns within the true church in the area of demon possession.
Many have wondered about the status of believers in relation to such claims. Can a Christian be demon-possessed? A look at accounts of persons in the Bible being possessed by a devil or demon gives us some helpful insights into the matter. To start off with, it is always an unbeliever that is the possessed individual. No where in the Old or New Testament is there even one clear, uncontested example of a true believer who is demon possessed. There are only four out of the total fifteen examples that could even remotely lead to the conclusion that a Christian can be indwelt by demons.
We will briefly look at these four examples. The first three examples pertain to Saul, the first king of Israel, in 1 Samuel. If we assume that Saul was a believer, it would appear that he was not demon possessed, as some would argue. If Saul was a believer, we can conclude that these phrases only suggest that the evil spirit never existed within Saul, but rather it tormented him externally. So if Saul was demon possessed, then the Hebrew language in all of the instances pertaining to him would have been sufficient to say so if that was the case.
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