7/2/05 Demonic possession should be treated by psychiatrists, not just exorcists, author says
Demonic possession should be treated by psychiatrists, not just exorcists, author says
Dark forces
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune
SANDY - Three believers sit around a table in the prayer room at Salt Lake Christian Fellowship, casually chatting before the "deliverance." There's Mary, the one with the demons; Sharon Seevinck, a full-time exorcist; and John Sooklaris, who, they say, has a gift for seeing. They are all middle-aged and remarkably ordinary. No white collars in sight.
Mary (not her real name) had a great-grandmother, two grandmothers and mother with mental illness, as well as a brother who killed himself, she says, and she suffered from schizophrenia and a bipolar disorder for 20 years before being healed by prayer sometime last year. God banished the voices in her head, hallucinations, and her emphysema but she still battles depression, anxiety about witchcraft and thoughts of suicide. She wants these demons gone, too.
Sooklaris says he sees a white sign over Mary's head that reads, "witch" so they begin there. Mary bows her head and closes her eyes.
"I command the spirit of witchcraft to go, you go, you go from here. I cancel the spells, go, go in Jesus' name. I speak to the generational witchcraft, you go, you go. Go in the name of Jesus Christ, you leave. Be gone. We sever any ties to witchcraft and we say to this spirit of witchcraft you get out of her," Seevinck says quietly over and over. At times, she places her hand above Mary's heart, on her arm, her forehead. She anoints Mary's head or ears with oil.
Periodically, she exchanges glances with Sooklaris, eager to determine if he has seen the demons leave. He shakes his head. Not yet.
"I see a black lace veil over her face," he says, then gets up and makes gestures as if he is removing it.
They continue to badger and belittle Mary's demons. First, witchcraft, then suicidal thoughts, worry and finally, paranoia. They lean closer to her, focusing their intense prayers.
"You go, your powers are canceled, you come out of her, your assignment is over," repeats Seevinck in her calm, steady voice. Sooklaris is more impatient and insistent.
"You loose this precious child," he says. "You go Ð out her throat."
Mary's head rolls back and then forward. Sometimes her eyes are open as she stares straight ahead or down. During the attack on her suicidal thoughts, she yawns many times as if the air has been sucked out of her.
At one point, Sooklaris says he sees worry beads in her right hand and at another time a knotted bedsheet noose around Mary's neck. He again mimes removing it.
To that, Mary replies that she had considered taking her life that way. But she is mostly silent, absorbing the verbal assaults on her demons.
And so it goes for two undisturbed hours in the prayer room.
In the end, Mary straightens up, opens her eyes, puts her glasses back on and says, "That was fabulous. I feel much better."
She senses she is not entirely free, though, so makes an appointment for another deliverance in two months.
A centuries-old tradition: What most people know about exorcism, they learned by watching the "The Exorcist," a 1973 horror film re-released in 2000. It tells of a 12-year-old girl unexpectedly overcome with superhuman strength and supernatural effects like scratching walls, flying chests and rocking beds. She growls, levitates and makes her head spin around 360 degrees while spitting profanities and vomiting on Catholic priests trying to help her.
The movie is based on a William Peter Blatty novel, which drew on a 1949 published report of demonic possession of a Maryland boy. Because the movie and real exorcism involved priests, most people think it's exclusively a Catholic rite.
But ridding people of dark forces goes well beyond that ancient faith. Most other Christians including some mainline Protestants, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Charismatics like Seevinck, Pentecostals and Mormons have routine ways of wrestling with the devil. So do Muslims and some Jews.
Now comes best-selling author M. Scott Peck, who wrote The Road Less Travelled and People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, with his own tale of exorcism.
In the 1970s, not long after being baptized into the Episcopal Church, Peck found himself officiating at two exorcisms, he writes in Glimpses of Evil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption.
"They were two of the most extraordinary experiences of my life," Peck said in a phone interview from his Connecticut home. "I just felt as I got older I could not go to my grave taking these stories with me."
The first involved Jersey, a 27-year-old mother of two who had schizophrenic tendencies, had lost all interest in her life and family, and often wandered away from her children. During the four-day ritual, Peck saw Jersey's mouth contort into a "harsh, malicious grin" and her face was "convulsed with a haughty sneer."
One by one, four demons inhabiting Jersey identified themselves as Damien, Tyrona, Josiah and Emil. Finally, Peck would confront the Big Guy - Satan - himself.
"It is my belief - not wholly scientific - that these demons did have a kind of existence of their own, independent of Jersey's imagination," he writes.
Jersey's exorcism was successful, Peck said, and she became a responsible and relatively contented mother.
Peck's second case was with Beccah, a woman in her mid-40s, who had a bad marriage, difficult family relationships and severe depression. Though the exorcism initially seemed to work, Peck acknowledges in the book that he lost the war with her demons and she eventually killed herself.
Even still, Peck believes that demonic possession should be added to the list of mental disorders, with formal exorcism a viable treatment, if conducted under carefully controlled circumstances.
"I strongly suggest that demonology ought to be taken seriously and dealt with scientifically," he says.
But few psychologists and psychiatrists seem ready to make that leap.
"Even if we assume for a minute that there are such things as evil spirits and they can take over a person's body, how do you tease that out from other conditions that might mimic it?" asks Stephen Morris, past president of the Utah Psychological Association. "Back in New Testament times, some things were reported as evil spirits that clearly were epilepsy or some other physical condition."
Psychologists gave up the idea of evil spirits when they took up science, he says.
Adding demonic possession to the list of mental disorders would be "like teaching creationism in the schools," Morris says.
And if they did add it, what criteria would be used to determine the diagnosis? And who would be qualified to treat it, he wonders. "Would you have to be an ordained minister or have theological training to detect it?"
That's a big question, given that several would-be exorcists recently have produced disastrous results.
Two years ago, an 8-year-old autistic child died of asphyxiation in Milwaukee, during an exorcism carried out by members of the Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith. And just last month, a Romanian Orthodox priest was arrested on murder charges for ordering a crucifixion for a 23-year-old nun because she was "possessed by the devil" and "had to be exorcised."
The need for deliverance: "Exorcism" is the term commonly used by Catholics. Other Christians, such as Seevinck, prefer the less controversial "deliverance."
Whether it's called exorcism or deliverance, she says, it is casting out demons. But she doesn't see these people as "possessed."
"Most people we pray for have a relationship with Jesus Christ," she says. "If a house has a cockroach in it, the house is not possessed by that cockroach. I see demons as irritations, squatters that are not supposed to be there. But the soul belongs to Jesus."
Before each deliverance, Seevinck asks participants to fill out a nine-page questionnaire that lists personal and family history including traumas, thoughts of suicide, depression, death in the family, involvement in a cult or witchcraft. Deliverance can undo curses, deal with trauma - especially sexual abuse - and bring emotional peace, she says.
She started this mission about 13 years ago when she prayed with a man who wanted to be freed from same-sex attractions. It worked miraculously, Seevinck claims.
"His wife saw significant changes in him. His eyes changed color. There was always a foul smell in the room when he woke up in the morning and that was gone. On top of that, he discovered her, fell in love with her."
Now Seevinck is a full-time minister at Salt Lake Christian Fellowship who does between three and five deliverances a week. Neither she nor the church charges for her services.
A few years ago, the charismatic preacher converted psychiatrist Jean Zehnder to the value of these deliverances. Zehnder suffered from anxiety during her psychiatric residency and neither therapy nor medications alleviated her suffering.
"When I had a deliverance, it was total healing, not just a Band-aid," she says.
Now a member of the International Society of Deliverance Ministers, Zehnder works to establish professional stand- ards so that ministry is not used inappropriately on mentally ill patients. She definitely believes that anxiety, depression, shame or self-hatred, anger, violence, suicidal thoughts and sexual problems often have a spiritual component.
"I minister to a lot of people from incest backgrounds," Zehnder says. "You can counsel with those people forever but praying with them seems much more effective."
And she has even seen cases with paranormal elements like something out of "The Exorcist."
"You can sometimes feel that something move inside of them, like having your hand on the abdomen of a pregnant woman," she says. "It is a very specific spirit, the spirit of a python, like the one listed in the Book of Acts."
The medical profession has turned its back on demons, but so has most of the Christian church, Zehnder says.
That's dangerous, Peck says. The devil is real and has a mission to destroy the human race.
"I call Satan an 'it' because unlike God, it has no creativity, no sexuality and is consistently hateful," he says. "But it is also stupid. If it weren't trying to show off, you'd never even get through to it in an exorcism. It wouldn't allow you to see it."
pstack@sltrib.com
E-mail your thoughts about this article to religioneditor@sltrib.com
Dark forces
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune
SANDY - Three believers sit around a table in the prayer room at Salt Lake Christian Fellowship, casually chatting before the "deliverance." There's Mary, the one with the demons; Sharon Seevinck, a full-time exorcist; and John Sooklaris, who, they say, has a gift for seeing. They are all middle-aged and remarkably ordinary. No white collars in sight.
Mary (not her real name) had a great-grandmother, two grandmothers and mother with mental illness, as well as a brother who killed himself, she says, and she suffered from schizophrenia and a bipolar disorder for 20 years before being healed by prayer sometime last year. God banished the voices in her head, hallucinations, and her emphysema but she still battles depression, anxiety about witchcraft and thoughts of suicide. She wants these demons gone, too.
Sooklaris says he sees a white sign over Mary's head that reads, "witch" so they begin there. Mary bows her head and closes her eyes.
"I command the spirit of witchcraft to go, you go, you go from here. I cancel the spells, go, go in Jesus' name. I speak to the generational witchcraft, you go, you go. Go in the name of Jesus Christ, you leave. Be gone. We sever any ties to witchcraft and we say to this spirit of witchcraft you get out of her," Seevinck says quietly over and over. At times, she places her hand above Mary's heart, on her arm, her forehead. She anoints Mary's head or ears with oil.
Periodically, she exchanges glances with Sooklaris, eager to determine if he has seen the demons leave. He shakes his head. Not yet.
"I see a black lace veil over her face," he says, then gets up and makes gestures as if he is removing it.
They continue to badger and belittle Mary's demons. First, witchcraft, then suicidal thoughts, worry and finally, paranoia. They lean closer to her, focusing their intense prayers.
"You go, your powers are canceled, you come out of her, your assignment is over," repeats Seevinck in her calm, steady voice. Sooklaris is more impatient and insistent.
"You loose this precious child," he says. "You go Ð out her throat."
Mary's head rolls back and then forward. Sometimes her eyes are open as she stares straight ahead or down. During the attack on her suicidal thoughts, she yawns many times as if the air has been sucked out of her.
At one point, Sooklaris says he sees worry beads in her right hand and at another time a knotted bedsheet noose around Mary's neck. He again mimes removing it.
To that, Mary replies that she had considered taking her life that way. But she is mostly silent, absorbing the verbal assaults on her demons.
And so it goes for two undisturbed hours in the prayer room.
In the end, Mary straightens up, opens her eyes, puts her glasses back on and says, "That was fabulous. I feel much better."
She senses she is not entirely free, though, so makes an appointment for another deliverance in two months.
A centuries-old tradition: What most people know about exorcism, they learned by watching the "The Exorcist," a 1973 horror film re-released in 2000. It tells of a 12-year-old girl unexpectedly overcome with superhuman strength and supernatural effects like scratching walls, flying chests and rocking beds. She growls, levitates and makes her head spin around 360 degrees while spitting profanities and vomiting on Catholic priests trying to help her.
The movie is based on a William Peter Blatty novel, which drew on a 1949 published report of demonic possession of a Maryland boy. Because the movie and real exorcism involved priests, most people think it's exclusively a Catholic rite.
But ridding people of dark forces goes well beyond that ancient faith. Most other Christians including some mainline Protestants, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Charismatics like Seevinck, Pentecostals and Mormons have routine ways of wrestling with the devil. So do Muslims and some Jews.
Now comes best-selling author M. Scott Peck, who wrote The Road Less Travelled and People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, with his own tale of exorcism.
In the 1970s, not long after being baptized into the Episcopal Church, Peck found himself officiating at two exorcisms, he writes in Glimpses of Evil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption.
"They were two of the most extraordinary experiences of my life," Peck said in a phone interview from his Connecticut home. "I just felt as I got older I could not go to my grave taking these stories with me."
The first involved Jersey, a 27-year-old mother of two who had schizophrenic tendencies, had lost all interest in her life and family, and often wandered away from her children. During the four-day ritual, Peck saw Jersey's mouth contort into a "harsh, malicious grin" and her face was "convulsed with a haughty sneer."
One by one, four demons inhabiting Jersey identified themselves as Damien, Tyrona, Josiah and Emil. Finally, Peck would confront the Big Guy - Satan - himself.
"It is my belief - not wholly scientific - that these demons did have a kind of existence of their own, independent of Jersey's imagination," he writes.
Jersey's exorcism was successful, Peck said, and she became a responsible and relatively contented mother.
Peck's second case was with Beccah, a woman in her mid-40s, who had a bad marriage, difficult family relationships and severe depression. Though the exorcism initially seemed to work, Peck acknowledges in the book that he lost the war with her demons and she eventually killed herself.
Even still, Peck believes that demonic possession should be added to the list of mental disorders, with formal exorcism a viable treatment, if conducted under carefully controlled circumstances.
"I strongly suggest that demonology ought to be taken seriously and dealt with scientifically," he says.
But few psychologists and psychiatrists seem ready to make that leap.
"Even if we assume for a minute that there are such things as evil spirits and they can take over a person's body, how do you tease that out from other conditions that might mimic it?" asks Stephen Morris, past president of the Utah Psychological Association. "Back in New Testament times, some things were reported as evil spirits that clearly were epilepsy or some other physical condition."
Psychologists gave up the idea of evil spirits when they took up science, he says.
Adding demonic possession to the list of mental disorders would be "like teaching creationism in the schools," Morris says.
And if they did add it, what criteria would be used to determine the diagnosis? And who would be qualified to treat it, he wonders. "Would you have to be an ordained minister or have theological training to detect it?"
That's a big question, given that several would-be exorcists recently have produced disastrous results.
Two years ago, an 8-year-old autistic child died of asphyxiation in Milwaukee, during an exorcism carried out by members of the Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith. And just last month, a Romanian Orthodox priest was arrested on murder charges for ordering a crucifixion for a 23-year-old nun because she was "possessed by the devil" and "had to be exorcised."
The need for deliverance: "Exorcism" is the term commonly used by Catholics. Other Christians, such as Seevinck, prefer the less controversial "deliverance."
Whether it's called exorcism or deliverance, she says, it is casting out demons. But she doesn't see these people as "possessed."
"Most people we pray for have a relationship with Jesus Christ," she says. "If a house has a cockroach in it, the house is not possessed by that cockroach. I see demons as irritations, squatters that are not supposed to be there. But the soul belongs to Jesus."
Before each deliverance, Seevinck asks participants to fill out a nine-page questionnaire that lists personal and family history including traumas, thoughts of suicide, depression, death in the family, involvement in a cult or witchcraft. Deliverance can undo curses, deal with trauma - especially sexual abuse - and bring emotional peace, she says.
She started this mission about 13 years ago when she prayed with a man who wanted to be freed from same-sex attractions. It worked miraculously, Seevinck claims.
"His wife saw significant changes in him. His eyes changed color. There was always a foul smell in the room when he woke up in the morning and that was gone. On top of that, he discovered her, fell in love with her."
Now Seevinck is a full-time minister at Salt Lake Christian Fellowship who does between three and five deliverances a week. Neither she nor the church charges for her services.
A few years ago, the charismatic preacher converted psychiatrist Jean Zehnder to the value of these deliverances. Zehnder suffered from anxiety during her psychiatric residency and neither therapy nor medications alleviated her suffering.
"When I had a deliverance, it was total healing, not just a Band-aid," she says.
Now a member of the International Society of Deliverance Ministers, Zehnder works to establish professional stand- ards so that ministry is not used inappropriately on mentally ill patients. She definitely believes that anxiety, depression, shame or self-hatred, anger, violence, suicidal thoughts and sexual problems often have a spiritual component.
"I minister to a lot of people from incest backgrounds," Zehnder says. "You can counsel with those people forever but praying with them seems much more effective."
And she has even seen cases with paranormal elements like something out of "The Exorcist."
"You can sometimes feel that something move inside of them, like having your hand on the abdomen of a pregnant woman," she says. "It is a very specific spirit, the spirit of a python, like the one listed in the Book of Acts."
The medical profession has turned its back on demons, but so has most of the Christian church, Zehnder says.
That's dangerous, Peck says. The devil is real and has a mission to destroy the human race.
"I call Satan an 'it' because unlike God, it has no creativity, no sexuality and is consistently hateful," he says. "But it is also stupid. If it weren't trying to show off, you'd never even get through to it in an exorcism. It wouldn't allow you to see it."
pstack@sltrib.com
E-mail your thoughts about this article to religioneditor@sltrib.com
posted by Aestrea Raven at Saturday, July 02, 2005
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