Spirit Influence on Mental Health
Spirit Influence
on Mental Health:
Is
‘spirit’ intrusion an important overlooked factor in hallucinatory disorders?
Conference Report
by Dr Fiona Bowie (King’s College London)
“Your vision will become clear only when you
can look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside
awakes.”
Carl Jung
Conference Theme:
In past times mental
illness was considered to be caused by spirit entanglement or possession and treated
as such. In rejecting the possibility of the continuation of consciousness
beyond death modern science, in its outreach through psychiatry, has denied the
possibility of spirit influence in mental health conditions including
schizophrenia, auditory and perceptual hallucinations, and identity disorders.
Has science thrown the baby out with the bath water by rigidly affirming this
stance and thereby creating barriers to dealing holistically with a wide range
of mental health conditions? This conference, bringing together a number of
experts, will consider the impact of spirit influence in mental health,
suggesting alternative yet complementary ways to heal the mind. It will be of
value to all those dealing with mental health issues, including psychiatrists,
GPs, therapists, mental health nurses as well as those who feel that they are,
or might be, suffering from some form of spirit interference.
Speakers:
Dr Erlendur Haraldsson, professor emeritus of
psychology at the University of Iceland and author of The Departed Among the
Living; Dr David McDonald, consultant psychiatrist and advisor to
the Churches Ministry on ‘Deliverance’, Dr Terence Palmer, author of The
Science of Spirit Possession, Denise Clark, an NHS mental health
assessor, who has direct experience in dealing with her own possession states, Mike
Williamson, practising medium and author of Schizophrenia or Spirit
Possession and Dr David Furlong, Transpersonal Counsellor, Director
of Spirit Release Forum and author of Illuminating the Shadow.
This was the subject and line up of
the Spirit Release Forum Day Conference
held at Regent’s University in London on Saturday 4th February 2017.
It attracted around ninety participants, many of whom identified themselves as
practising healers. While a few were working within the National Health
Service, the majority seemed to be in private practice where they are able to
offer a wider range of complementary therapies, including those based on
theories of spirt attachment. A few
participants were there because family members with mental health issues are
being treated by one or more of the speakers. It is possible that others came
because they are seeking help and have found conventional therapies wanting, or
simply because they are on the Spirit Release Forum (SRF) mailing list. The
atmosphere throughout the day was remarkably collegial. Speakers were un-defensive,
and questions open, curious and questioning – which was appropriate given the
controversial nature of some of the ideas, case studies, experiences and
practices under discussion. It appeared
to be a safe space in which notions of spirit influence and possession could be
explored, as well as being a fascinating insight into an area of human
experience familiar to anthropologists working cross-culturally, but generally
concealed within Western cultures. A sub-theme running through the day was the
hostility encountered by those with mental health problems and their families,
and by holistic healers, within the NHS. It was apparent listening to people’s
stories that conventional medicine remains hostile to the notion of ‘spirit’ or
spirituality (even prayer) and continues to operate within a reductive materialist
paradigm in thrall to ‘big pharma’. The holistic healers wanted to see
themselves as complementary partners of orthodox medicine rather than a radical
alternative, but in practice they are obliged to operate in a parallel world
that remains largely invisible.[1]
Professor Erlendur Haraldsson, Professsor Emeritus of Psychology at
the University of Iceland, opened the conference with a talk entitled Departed among the living: evidence for the
continuation of consciousness after death.
Erlendur Haraldsson is a highly
respected scholar of the paranormal who has conducted research into children’s accounts of
past lives, mediumship (Indridi Indrdason), miracles (Sai Baba), death-bed
visions, and encounters with the dead. The talk was largely based on data from
his recent book The Departed Among the
Living, although also drew on his earlier work. Haraldsson was the only speaker who is primarily
an academic rather than a practitioner, but in providing a solid body of
evidence highly suggestive of the continuation of consciousness beyond physical
death, set the stage nicely for the presentations that followed. His approach
is cautious, statistical and measured, necessary perhaps when dealing with
phenomena that are dismissed out of hand by many academic psychologists.
The European Human Values Survey
(1980-83) asked people “Have you ever felt you were really in touch with
someone who died?’ The affirmative responses varied from a high point of up to forty
four percent of Icelanders to a low of nine percent in Norway. Italy had a high
response rate with thirty four percent of those questioned believing that they
had really been contacted by a deceased
person. The UK was somewhere in the middle with twenty six percent. The
question has been repeated in various surveys with very similar results. I
suspect that the experience of encountering someone who has died, whether
visually, hearing a voice, sensing a presence, or by some other means (dreams
were excluded) occurs with a similar frequency everywhere and it is the interpretation of the experience that varies.
Some cultures are more open to the reality of spirits or the continuation of
life after the death than others. The key part of the question may be the word ‘really’
as there is plenty of evidence that experiences that don’t fit into our
understanding of what is possible are likely to be dismissed, forgotten, or
regarded as a product of the imagination (See, for example, Bowie (2014), ‘Believing
Impossible Things: Scepticism and Ethnographic Enquiry’).
In the question
and answer session following this talk one participant pointed out that both
Iceland and Italy with high levels of apparent after death contact were also
affected by volcanic activity. While the relationship between physical
phenomena and psychic awareness was not something that Haraldsson’s study
addressed, it is certainly an area worthy of consideration. Folk traditions
consistently talk of certain places being ‘thin’ or portals to other worlds,
and in his study of Brazilian medium Amyr Amiden, psychologist Stanley Krippner did find
correlations between atmospheric conditions and Amiden’s psychic and
mediumistic abilities (particularly when it came to producing apports, objects
that appear out of nowhere in the physical world).
The relevance of
Haraldsson’s study for the presentations that followed is that it provided a comprehensive
body of evidence that some spirits appear to remain in or close to the material
earth after death and intentionally or unintentionally seek out or otherwise
make themselves known to the living. We can begin to imagine a plane of
existence at the limits of our perception - and at the boundaries of our energy
fields – inhabited by conscious entities. It is this realm that the speakers
with mediumistic abilities begin to explore and seek to understand when dealing
with spirit intrusions that manifest as hallucinatory disorders. As Haraldsson
put it, there are ‘indications’ that death may be a gate to another form of
existence and that we live in a multiversum
as opposed to a universum.
Dr David Furlong, a transpersonal counsellor, writer and director
of the Spirit Release Forum, gave the second talk, entitled, A psycho-spiritual blueprint for mental
health: case studies involving spirit attachments and their release.
The view of the
Self and psyche that comes out of Furlong’s work, illustrated by his case
studies, is of a complex, fascinating and sometimes baffling inner world. With
humorous and simple illustrations, Furlong explained that his work with clients
involves first of all helping them to connect to their ‘higher self’ –
envisaged as an overarching Self that is present in a non-material domain, but
which is aware of and can act as a source of light for the incarnated soul or
self. The embodied self has free will and may be more or less aware of its
higher self (HS), as well as of disembodied guides and helpers. In Western
psychology we tend to think of the self, ideally at least, as a unified
discrete entity. Where it ‘splits’ through trauma or dissociation this is
regarded as pathological and the goal of therapy, particularly from a
psychoanalytic perspective, lies in reintegrating the split or lost parts of
the psyche. In extreme cases the self seems to take on different personae, as
in classic cases of multiple personality disorder, more commonly referred to as
dissociative identity disorder or, in less severe cases, borderline personality
disorder. Whatever the labels, the individual concerned appears to have
different identities and can switch between them. They may or may not be aware
of each other and the central self or ego may be amnesic concerning the
activities of the sub personae.
Furlong asserted
that we all have a number of different identities. We will present ourselves
differently in a professional situation, at home with our families, out with
friends, and so on. In a balanced healthy individual the ego is in control of
these personae and can be self-reflexive concerning them. In cases of trauma or
shock a portion of the personality or soul energy can become split off and will
attempt to contain the trauma in order to protect the self from its effects.
This can happen a number of times and a sub-personality can potentially split
into further parts. Furlong likened these sub-personalities to children in
relation to the central self or ego, depicted as an adult householder, These
‘children’ may be aware of each other or may remain isolated or even in hiding
(‘in an under-stairs cupboard’). They may attract possessing spirits, either
earthbound souls – people who died and got lost on their way to the light, or
more negative entities. To complicate the picture even further some
sub-personalities from past lives, also with their nested possessing entities,
might reincarnate with an individual, perhaps still looking for healing and
understanding carried over from unresolved historical traumas. Each of these
parts has its own consciousness and free will, and in a therapeutic situation
needs to be identified and released, either into the light of the higher self or
into a safe space where it can reintegrate or at least become more aware of the
central ego self.
This
complex notion of the self and its constituent parts is similar to that
described by the American psychologist Thomas
Zinser, who describes his explorations of the inner mind stemming from his
own clinical practice, as described in his book Soul-Centered Healing (2010) and in subsequent works. There are
some minor differences between Zinser’s model and Furlong’s. Where Zinser talks
of the soul as the over-arching self, Furlong prefers to use the term spirit
and Higher Self. Zinser uses hypnosis and idiomatic finger signals to
communicate with clients, whereas Furlong asks direct questions of a client,
whether in hypnosis so as to communicate with their Higher Self, using spirit
guides for direction. This is partly due
to the fact that Furlong is himself mediumistic whereas Zinser is not, and
relied for some years on a spirit healer identified as Gerod, channelled by a
colleague, to whom he could bring his hard cases and discuss notions of the
soul and psyche.
To many people, including the
majority of clinical mental health professionals, any talk of spirits and
possession will be an anathema. Furlong was less concerned with justifying his
model of the self than with the
effectiveness of treatments based on these theories. Some case studies were
used to illustrate what does and does not work. At its simplest, a single short
session with a client can clear a number of sometimes long-standing and
apparently intractable problems (a spirit release therapist is generally a last
resort for desperate people). In other instances the complexity and number of
sub-personalities and attached entities, all of whom need to be identified and
persuaded to release any negative energies through the exercise of their free will, can take many sessions and
perhaps several years. A long-standing persistent problem may require in
addition much conventional work concerned with stabilising the client’s
life-style, strengthening their will power and creating new habits of thought
if the problems are not to return. The New Testament parable of the house
(self) swept clean (of unclean spirits), only to find that seven more come to
occupy it, was a concept very familiar to all those who engage with this kind
of work (see Luke 11:16-36, Matthew 12:38-45).
It is not
possible to do justice to Furlong’s presentation and discussions here, but
there were many themes that echo throughout Western literature and popular
culture, as well in ethnographic accounts, such as ‘contracts’ between dark
force entities and parts of the self, and how to disentangle and release the
soul or ego parts from these contracts. Throughout the day I, as an
anthropologist, was struck by the sense that here one did indeed find the
‘familiar made strange’ – we were entering a world of spirits and forces that
one might expect to encounter while undertaking fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa
or the forests of Papua New Guinea, but not among seemingly ordinary, educated men
and women in suits in central London. Furlong summarised his talk in four
points, that I will quote here (taken from his last slide, copyright David
Furlong 2017):
·
It is clear from my work with many clients that
forms of ‘spirit’ entanglement can give rise to forms of mental, psychological
and hallucinatory disturbance
·
If ‘spirits’ are just ‘lost’ they can easily be
removed but if ‘malign’ or ‘dark’ they can be much more difficult to extract
·
Our ‘inner world’ is a complex place and the
‘sub-personality’ parts of us also need a lot of healing and balancing
·
Our ‘H-S’ [Higher Self] is the single most
important part of this process
Mike Williamson, the third speaker, is a Spiritualist and
practising medium, who addressed the theme of Schizophrenia or spirit possession: a medium’s perspective, drawing on
case studies of spirit release. The
talk drew on material in his recent book Schizophrenia or Spirit Possession?
Williamson spoke simply and effectively, using
his own extensive experience of working in the world of spirits and healing. He
explained that he started the work in his thirties after finding that his house
was haunted, and looking for help. In the process he discovered his own
mediumistic abilities, and for some time specialised in house clearing for
people troubled by unwanted spirit occupants. As far as the theme of this
conference goes, Williamson started by making the point that schizophrenia,
unlike progressive conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis
or Alzheimer’s, has no identified pathology or location in the brain. In fact
the DSM 5[2] gives
such a wide range of diagnostic symptoms and possible causes that schizophrenia
appears as something of a ‘catch all’ term for a range of conditions
characterised by hearing voices and paranoia. Unlike the degenerative diseases
mentioned above, people can and do recover spontaneously from schizophrenia
with or without the help of drugs. For Williamson this indicates that treating
schizophrenia with drugs is at best looking at the symptoms but not the cause,
treating the brain when the problem is in the mind. Having made the case for
looking for alternative causes for schizophrenia, Williamson gave examples of
his work with clients who were, or thought that they were, troubled by spirits.
Williamson sounded a cautionary note, that not every unexplained event is the
result of sprit intrusion. In one instance a client was losing his hair and
felt that his eyebrows were being plucked out. The source of his ills turned
out to be spores from a fish tank with a splashy overactive pump. Where spirits
do attach themselves to someone and cause problems for them, Williamson
emphasised the importance of gaining discipline over the mind, and of learning
to distinguish one’s own thoughts from those of spirits who might be intruding.
When someone has had attached or possessing spirits removed they can feel the
difference and learn to identify spirit intrusion if it recurs. Williamson
generally works together with another medium, and like Furlong tries to
identify and speak to any attached spirits and to take, rather than send them
to the light. Where the free will of the client conflicts with the free will of
an attached spirit who doesn’t want to leave the free will of the client asking
for help always takes priority. An unwilling spirit can be removed with the
help of the client’s guides, and can be contained if he or she does not wish to
go to the light. Unlike Furlong (and Zinser), Williamson’s view of the interior
life is more conventionally Spiritualist. He sees the soul as a unity and does
not work with the notion of sub-personalities, or with past lives as claimed
not to have encountered them in his practice.
During
the questions that followed his talk the importance of treating the dead as
well as the living client was raised – unlike conventional Christian exorcism
that is more concerned with expelling or banishing ‘demons’ than with healing
the dead. As Williamson put it, if the
dead are not also treated and you can’t resolve their problems they won’t move
on. The reasons for becoming attached to someone in the first place are varied.
Some spirits do not realise that they have died, or fear that they will be
banished to hell if they go towards the light. Several of the spirit release
therapists who spoke had come across people who had been killed in a blast and
when they passed over saw the light, but were unable to distinguish it from the
explosion that killed them. In each instance resolving the issue that his
keeping a spirit earthbound is necessary if they are not to continue to plague
others. It is not uncommon for spirits to apologise for the harm they have
caused when they realise that the person suffering from hearing voices is being
harmed by their intrusions.
These
and other first-hand examples of spirit release are remarkably consistent with
those recorded by Western psychiatrists and healers who have delved into the
world of spirts when confronted by patients diagnosed with certain forms of
mental illness characterised by hearing voices, sudden changes of personality
and hallucinations. From the examples recorded by Dr Carl Wickland in his classic 30 Years Among the Dead (1924) at
the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the present, the techniques of
engaging the spirits in conversation, persuading them to leave the patient and
to move to where they are supposed to go remains the same. Some of these
continuities are discussed in my paper ‘Self,
Personhood and Possession’ (Bowie, 2013). In a question and answer panel
session the question of contracts between spirits and those with mental health
problems arose again. Dark beings, sometimes referred to as dark force entities
(DFEs), who may or may not have lived a human life, can work by making
contracts with a soul (or a sub-personality). This may be unconscious on the
part of the soul or ego fragment, and the conscious self remains unaware that a
part of them accepted an offer of protection, for example, in return for an
element of control by a DFE over their lives. The DFEs often work in groups as
they are generally not powerful enough to control someone’s will on their own,
and will use coercion and threats to convince the host that something terrible
will befall them if they break the contract. Furlong emphasised that these
contracts are a lie, and that the only valid contract is to the higher self, to
the truth and light within us. All such contracts can be dissolved. A member of
the audience contributed that these dark spirits also work within a hierarchy,
with some spirits working for others. The lower level spirits may also believe
that they are forced to honour contracts with those higher up the hierarchy and
to do their bidding. The work of these dark force entities can be identified,
according to Furlong, by their trademarks of fear, the inhibition of someone’s
free will and inflation of their ego.
The theme of dark forces that can
attack a person was encapsulated in a very personal testimony in the fourth
session. Denise Clark, who works for
the National Health Service in the UK. Clark shared her story of being
tormented by a particular individual over many lives, and of her struggle to
free herself from his curses, in a talk entitled, Facing my own personal demons whilst working as a mental health
assessor. The demons may have been personal, but they were certainly not
regarded as metaphorical. This was no figure of speech.
This is the most difficult of the talks to write about as it was deeply personal and rather harrowing, but also because I was aware that it asked the audience to enter a world very far removed from the material universe of post-Enlightenment rationality that we as Westerners have grown up in. I was sitting in the front row and could not but help being struck by Denise Clark’s extraordinary brown eyes, that seemed to reflect the years of terror and suffering that she had endured, as well has her extraordinary courage in confronting the forces she encountered. The conference talks were all recorded so will presumably be available in some form on the Spirit Release Forum website, so I won’t attempt to recount her experience in full here. Clark started by saying that she would read her presentation as ‘thought-blocking’ was one of the tools her aggressor or aggressors used.
The
story started with Clark experiencing an earthbound spirit and kinetic
poltergeist activity. A medium identified the spirit as her dead father who was
trying to attract her attention. She could not think why he would continue to
visit her in this manner and to disturb
her sleep, and woke up one night convinced not only that it was not her father
who was visiting, but that whatever it was could only be described as evil. This
realisation began a chain reaction and for some years Clark was terrorised by
multiple entities at night. She understood them to be hierarchically related,
their superior being an incubus who
attacked her sexually and prevented from sleeping.
Denise Clark
went onto describe some of her journey to recovery. She leaned to put herself
into a deep trance, and to use a pendulum to ask questions regarding the issues
facing her. She also had contact with David Furlong and the Spirit Release
Forum and was helped to strengthen the connection with her higher self. The
story that emerged was of remembered past lives in which a particularly abusive
individual, with whom she had a brief relationship with in her current life,
recurred and played a similarly negative role. He was possessive and jealous,
putting curses on her if she tried to leave him. A deep curse put on Clark in
the Sixth Century by this man was that if he couldn’t have her no one else
would, and that she would remain isolated and alone, hence the incubus attacks
and terrible isolation from family and friends over many lives. When in
desperation Clark had on two occasions asked for help at work she had instead
been disciplined and told that she must not speak about spirits. This in itself
was the cause of further trauma. There followed quite a bit of discussion about
the nature of curses, and how they could be broken. Clark maintained that it
was necessary to identify the words used in order to break or unravel a curse. To
make things more complicated, Clark identified hundreds of fragmented
personality parts as a result of trauma over this life and previous lives,
which needed to be individually healed.
She saw this as a work in progress rather than a completed task. The
‘gentleman’ who had tormented her had, she told us, sent more curses recently
but as she was now better protected they had rebounded on him. As he could not
remember the actual words used in each curse he was unable to deflect or undo
them, and was suffering physically as a result.
This apotropaic
form of protection is a common and possibly universal phenomenon, in which the
spell or curse rebounds on the sender. The amulets of blue glass or hands with eyes
in the palm found in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, for example, are intended
to ward off the Evil Eye, forming a protective barrier to deflect harm. Those familiar with the work of French
anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada
in Normandy will also recognise the idea of spells being deflected back on the
sender in such a way that the boundary between those who are victims of
witchcraft and those who are witches suffering the rebounding effects of their
curses or spells, or ‘de-witchers’ who have intercepted the spells, taking the
hit themselves, become blurred. In the work that formed her doctoral thesis,
and in many subsequent books and articles, Favret-Saada has demonstrated the
tenacity of witchcraft beliefs in supposedly modern European contexts, as well
as their economic and social correlates. Favret-Saada concludes that witchcraft
exists but witches do not. She does not enter the realm of the paranormal in
seeking explanations of witchcraft, or at least not in print. Another Western
source of curses, as well as blessings, are the collected works of the Scottish
tax collector Alexander Carmichael,
who toured the Highlands and Hebridean Islands of Scotland in the late
Nineteenth Century, collecting Gaelic oral literature. The published works,
known as the Carmina Gadelica (1900) are now
available online, and contain many examples of apotropaic prayers and curses.
The Holy Trinity, God the Father, Christ, Mary, St Michael and Saint Bride or Bridget, among others, are invoked as protection from all
supernatural and natural harm. Incantations are often accompanied
by rituals, as with the Normandy peasant farmers described by Favret-Saada, and
once again particular linguistic formulae as well as protective ritual acts are
carefully prescribed. In both Scotland and Northern France it is the whole
farming family unit– a man, his wife, children and livestock, that come under
attack. In this example, part of a Spell
for the Evil Eye (Vol.2) Mary is invoked as protection against spells,
which are deflected on sender and his domain. 
Extraordinary,
perhaps incredible, as Denise Clark’s story may seem, its parallels and antecedents in Western and non-Western
cultures raise questions of cultural continuity and the role of individual
experience in the recurrence of spirit-related phenomena. One reason that we consign
stories of curses and an emphasis on
knowing the right words to other cultures, but find them difficult to relate to
in the West, is that we no longer emphasise the material nature of the sign. Within Vedic
Hinduism the sacred syllable ‘OM’ when chanted links the devotee directly to
the divine source of being. Tibetan Buddhists will turn prayer wheels, the
physical carrier of the words itself helping to transmit the words written on
it and their intentions. Sikhs make their devotions to their holy book, the
Guru Granth Sahib, and Muslims regard the physical Qur’an with great respect, and
hold that the actual words in Arabic
have sacred power. The practice in Christian countries of swearing on the Bible
when taking an oath also points to the material nature of language and its
power. Within a scientific world view, however, the power of words as words of
power, and as material signs that can actually have an effect on and in the
world, has largely been lost. Theosophical teachings that reached Europe and
America from India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries went some way to
reintroducing the idea of words and thoughts are material and have a physical
effect in the world. However widespread such ideas are in the West they remain largely
confined to religious spheres and on the fringes of public consciousness. To
many people words are immaterial transient entities that have a limited life and effect. If one holds this
view a curse is only effective if it unsettles someone, not because of its
intrinsic power.
Dr David McDonald, the penultimate speaker, is a consultant psychiatrist
working within the NHS and an advisor to the Church of England on its healing
ministry. He co-chairs the Church’s Ministry
of Deliverance Study Group with Dominic Walker, former Bishop of Monmouth
in South Wales. The Group advises the
Church of England on healing and trains clergy in ‘exorcism’ and ‘deliverance’.
It contains both clergy and professional psychiatrists and treads a delicate
line between spiritual and organic explanations of mental illness, as
indicated in its Guidelines
for Good Practice (2012). McDonald’s talk also attempted to bridge these
two worlds, and was entitled The
psychopathology of mental illness: the interface between the psychological and
spiritual. While the Church of England pays lip service to the existence of
spirits and leaves open a space for their role in certain forms of mental
illness, in practice there is little consensus the reality and role of spirits.
Within the professional sphere of psychiatry there is even less scope for including
a spiritual sphere. When an audience member asked McDonald about the possible
role of past life influences on mental health, for example, he replied that as
a psychiatrist ‘you couldn’t even go there’.
McDonald
traced his own career from assessing adult offenders to working with children
and families, where early interventions can help prevent some of the later
offending behaviours. He presented an accurate account of attachment disorders
in children who have been abandoned, abused or traumatised and the ways in
which dissociation (Furlong’s sub-personalities) can impact on adult behaviour.
An intervention programme aimed at vulnerable mothers from pregnancy until the
second year of their first child’s life proved very successful in preventing
anti-social behaviours was pioneered in the USA and rolled out in the UK in
2008, but came to an end with the advent of GP led clinical commissioning
groups as it was not seen as priority. As someone who spans the religious and
psychiatric worlds, McDonald understands psychopathology,
literally ‘soul’ + ‘disease’, as involving spiritual, biological, behavioural
and psychological elements. While he presented a more conventionally
psychological explanation of mental illness, particularly in attachment
disorders, than the mediumistic speakers, there were many points of comparison.
Children with a disordered attachment, for example, were described as possessed
by diabolical thoughts and feelings. Etymologically their worlds are ‘torn
apart’ (‘disordered’) rather than ‘drawn together’ or symbolic (Greek symballein, to ‘throw together’).
Children (and adults) with reactive attachment disorders cannot handle symbolic
thinking. The prison population is full of such people who without early
interventions may need containment for life. The solutions lie in opportunities
to develop healthy relationships. As McDonald put it, it is what happens
between people that matters. A non-judgmental listening therapist can enable
patients to exercise free will and to make
better choices in life. Helping damaged people build healthy relationships
draws on spiritual as well as human resources – McDonald prefaced his talk with
William Blake’s painting of ‘The
Good and Evil Angels’ battling over an infant in order to illustrate the cosmic
element of psychoanalysis. The death instinct was described as an absence of a
life instinct. Young people who want to die often don’t know how to live and
suicide can be a desire to return to a child-like innocence, a search for
forgiveness. Coming to terms with what they have done or become can seem much
more challenging than dying to offenders who attempt or succeed in committing
suicide. It may seem impossible to contemplate forgiveness without an
understanding of redemption. A religious world view of an eternally loving,
accepting deity can help people come to terms with their past and to rebuild
their lives.
While remaining
grounded in the medial language of psychiatry, McDonald had also had sufficient
evidence from his practice that he was not just dealing with brain chemistry
when treating patients. On a couple of occasions he met new clients who would
not have known he was coming, who claimed to have been told by spirits that Dr
McDonald would see them and help them. He claomed that there was not natural
means by which they could have obtained that information. As someone who has
supported the Spirit Release Forum for a number of years, McDonald continues to
tread the difficult path of admitting to the possibility and efficacy of spirit
release therapy, while maintaining a professional position within mainstream medicine.
The last speaker
of the day was Dr Terence Palmer, a
spirit release therapist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on one of the
founders of the Society for Psychical Research, Frederic W.H. Myers (1843-1901),
published as The Science of Spirit
Possession. Dr Palmer’s talk, Medical science and spirit influence: The
need for research, described some current projects aimed as documenting the
process of spirit release and of assessing its efficacy. Palmer also called for
further controlled scientific work in on spirit release therapy. While clinical
controlled trials or university-led research projects might be seen as the gold
standard for evaluating SRT, it is also clear that the dominance of a
materialist paradigm within the public domain presents a formidable barrier to
such research.[3]
It is for this reason that some new projects conducted by those already
practising SRT are of particular interest.
The first project
described by Palmer is termed ‘The Ross Project’, after the Herefordshire town
Ross-on-Wye where it started in November 2016. A group of spirit release
therapists, including some of those who were present at the conference, met
together with three families who had family members suffering from
schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder or hearing voices (all of whom
were also present). The idea was, first of all, to bring relief through remote
spirit work to the three clients, and secondly to record the interventions used
and any results. These were cases involving conditions that appeared intractable
and which had persisted over a number of years. SRT was seen as something that
could be practiced alongside, rather than as an alternative to, drug-based and
psychological therapies. Palmer has been working on a protocol that can provide
some consistency for the different practitioners, and another member of the
group has volunteered to coordinate any interventions and their effects. I have
been involved in this project from the start and have found it fascinating as
an exercise and as a method of working. The client-based focus and generous use
of time and resources by the mediums and therapists involved have enabled practices
to be tested and discussed in a way that is not generally possible in a field
dominated by individual practitioners.
Terence Palmer
often works with a medium called Andy, and Andy’s spirit guide,
Chen. Through an intervention from Chen, Palmer recently started running
workshops for people suffering from auditory hallucinations (Hearing Voices Research)
intended to both offer practical help to sufferers and to demonstrate the
methods used in SRT. Many examples of spirit release from this project and from
Palmer’s private practice have been recorded and are available on his YouTube
channel, Healing
the Wounded Spirit. One of the case studies Palmer recounted from a recent
Hearing Voices workshop featured an
ex-soldier who said that he had been ’pestered by a gang of voices’ for twenty
three years. He had tried many conventional interventions, none of which had
helped. A single session of spirit release therapy identified the troubled
souls who had been with him for all this time and released them to the light.
For the first time in more than two decades the man was free of his troublesome voices,
but was left feeling very angry towards a medical profession that had failed to
help him for so long. The voices have not recurred.
The reason for
introducing ethnographic accounts from non-Western societies is to make the
point that the healing techniques of European or American spirit release
therapists sit squarely within a broader human understanding of the
relationship between mind, body and spirit that appears to be both universal
and ancient. For all the advances and benefits of contemporary medical practice
and a post-Enlightenment world view, it is historically anomalous to view healing
solely in biological or material terms.
The
dialogue in this conference on ‘Spirit Influence on Mental Health’ was between
the medical profession and spirit release practices. It also touched on more
conventional religious views through the work of David McDonald. There is a
somewhat parallel discussion between biblical scholars and anthropologists,
with the former drawing on cross-cultural examples in order to give weight to
an ontological basis to biblical examples of spirit possession and exorcism.
Craig Keener (2010:235), for example, in his article Spirit Possession as a Cross-cultural
Experience, concluded that; “In view of the wide range of phenomena
attested, some features of early Christian accounts that have appeared suspect
to modern western interpreters appear plausible as genuine descriptions of
possessed behavior…. Nothing in the early Christian descriptions requires us to
assume that they could not depend on genuine eyewitness material”. Within
anthropology these ideas feed into discussion of the anthropology
of ontology or ‘ontological turn’. There is often a tension between the Western-trained
anthropologist and the views of those he or she encounters in the field. The
extent to which interpretations that are dissonant with a dominant paradigm can
be accommodated in their own terms,
as opposed to simply described phenomenologically or explained according to
established Western paradigms, remains problematic. I have attempted to find a
way forward by developing a methodology that does not shy away from ontological
questions (‘Towards
a Methodology for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife’), and through
the research carried out and shared by the Afterlife Research Centre. The
free online journal Paranthropology
is also an important resource for the discussion and the dissemination of
academic studies that take the idea that we live in two, or more, dimensions,
seriously.
With thanks to
all those who organised, contributed to and participated in the Spirit
Influence on Mental Health Day Conference.
Fiona
Bowie
9.2.17
The talks and discussion
were recorded and will in due course be made available via the Spirit Release
Forum website.
[1] The
SRF is certainly not alone in identifying a frustration with conventional,
reductive approaches to mental health. As I was writing this report Jungian
psychologist Paul Reynolds uploaded a research paper on his Academia.edu
site that argues passionately against the ‘criminalisation’ of naturally
occurring forms of ‘ontological angst’ – including the visionary and mystic who
hears voices, a phenomenon that has been with us as a species for millennia. One can also point to medical anthropologist
Natalie Tobert’s ground-breaking books, Spiritual Psychiatries: Mental Health Practices in India and UK (2014)
and Cultural Perspectives on Mental Wellbeing
(2016), and to her attempts to bridge Western and non-Western medical
practices.
[2] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (2013), published by the American Psychiatric Association,
is the most widely used source of classification for clinicians diagnosing
mental illnesses. That such classifications are as much cultural as biological
is clear when one looks the history and descriptions of mental disorders as
they change over time.
[3] Dr
Alan Sanderson, founder of the Spirit Release
Foundation, who was present at the conference, was forced to leave his work as an NHS consultant psychiatrist
when he started to introduce the notion of spirit influence on his patients.
Labels: David Furlong, David McDonald, Denise Clark, Erlendur Haraldsson, Mike Williamson, psychiatry, schizophrenia, spirit possession, Spirit Release Forum, Spirit release therapy, Terence Palmer
posted by Fiona | 17:06
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