Wow, Phil!!

What a testimony! I wish the whole thing could have been stated 
herein! I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for the rest of the story!!


LOVE,
Reeva Parry.


On Saturday 4/21/2007 05:35 PM, Phil Scovell sent:

>This is a newsletter I receive from time to time.  I posted this story once
>before but read it again today.  It is a good reminder.  Since I have, more
>than once, been told I believe in psycho heresy, I thought this story by a
>Christian psychiatrist near Chicago, Illinois, who has over 6,000 hours of
>experience doing intercessory prayer ministry, and who was trained under the
>same ministry I was trained five years ago, and by the same Christian man as
>well, would be worth posting to the list again.  I only have 2500 hours of
>intercessory prayer ministry experience so far but I am always learning and
>I learned something very important from this testimony by Dr. Lehman, too.
>
>Phil.
>
>
>I have included the biggest piece of new material below (unfortunately, the
>footnotes don't come through on the e-mail).  See the "Posted Documents"
>section on the website for the complete updated version.
>
>Blessings,
>
>Dr. Lehman/Karl
>
>
>
>
>3. Demonic Infection, Opposition, Harassment: Secular mental health
>professionals can't see or understand any way in which demonic infection,
>opposition, or harassment contribute to the clinical picture because they
>have no place in their world view for these phenomena. Unfortunately, many
>Christian mental health professionals (and pastors) hold the same "demons
>don't exist" world view as their secular colleagues. Demonic harassment
>and/or deception can cause fixed beliefs that appear to be psychotic
>delusions.1 Demonic infection, opposition, and harassment can produce
>"voices," images, and physical sensations that can look exactly like visual,
>auditory, and tactile hallucinations. Demonic spirits can produce confusion
>and disorganization that look very much like psychotic thought disorder.
>Demonic spirits can produce disorganized and/or catatonic behavior. Again,
>if a mental health provider does not recognize these
>pseudo-psychotic/psychotic signs and symptoms as demonic phenomena, they
>will understandably try to make the clinical picture fit into the next
>closest diagnostic box (usually bipolar disorder or schizophrenia).
>
>For example, during one of my temporary assignments at a state psychiatric
>hospital, I was asked to perform a psychiatric evaluation on a young man who
>had been sent from an outpatient mental health clinic with the request that
>he be admitted to our inpatient unit. His chart indicated that he had been
>carrying the diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia for a number of
>years, and his case worker had sent him for admission because he seemed to
>be having an acute psychotic exacerbation, and she was concerned that his
>psychotic symptoms might cause him to harm himself or someone else. When I
>went into the examination room, I found a young man who was pacing back and
>forth across the room in an anxious, agitated fashion, and who began to
>explain that he needed to stay in the hospital "until I can get things back
>under control."
>
>He described how he had been a very lonely, unhappy teenager until, while
>looking through an occult bookstore one day, he had discovered an Ouija
>board with a friendly looking spirit attached to it. "People are so
>ignorant," he commented, "The other Ouija boards didn't even have spirits,
>but people bought them anyway - what a waste! The boards without spirits are
>totally worthless." The friendly looking spirit offered to be his friend, so
>he bought the board and invited this new "friend" into his life. He could
>describe its visual appearance in detail, and claimed that it had introduced
>itself, by name, when they had first met in the occult bookstore. "At first,
>it was great," he explained, "I finally had a friend. The spirit would go
>everywhere with me, and I could talk to it any time I wanted to." "But then
>it started telling me to hurt children....Now, it tries to get me to hurt
>children all of the time. Whenever I walk past the park, it tells me to
>kidnap, torture, rape, and kill the children....Whenever I feel like I'm
>getting weak, and I'm afraid I might give in, I come into the hospital until
>I can get things back under control."
>
>As the evaluating psychiatrist, one of the most striking things about this
>young man was that, other than the content of his story, and his anxious,
>agitated pacing, he seemed to be completely normal. I had worked with
>hundreds of patients with chronic schizophrenia, and my experience was that
>patients with true schizophrenia always had many other signs and symptoms in
>addition to the more dramatic psychotic symptoms (such as hallucinations and
>delusions). In my experience, patients with true schizophrenia also had
>abnormalities in their social interactions, nonverbal communication,
>cognitive functioning, and thought organization. For example, people with
>schizophrenia will display abnormalities of facial expression and other
>details of body language, abnormalities of voice tone and vocal inflection,
>abnormalities of timing with respect to social responses, characteristic
>abnormalities of thought organization (the "thought disorders" described
>above), and a variety of subtle problems with other cognitive functions.
>
>This young man, however, displayed social interactions, nonverbal
>communications, cognitive functioning, and thought processes that were all
>completely normal. Furthermore, he didn't have any other hallucinations or
>delusions - other than his perceptions and beliefs regarding his "spirit
>friend," his sensory perceptions and thought content were completely normal.
>
>So it occurred to me: "Maybe he actually is being oppressed by a demonic
>spirit, and is otherwise normal - maybe he doesn't even have schizophrenia
>at all."2 With this thought in mind, I decided to pursue a treatment option
>that would certainly be considered unusual for schizophrenia: "I notice that
>you are wearing a cross. Is Christian spirituality important to you?" When
>he answered that he had grown up in a Christian home, and that he had been
>baptized as a child, I suggested that we might pray, and ask the Lord to
>deal with this spirit that was now pushing him to hurt children.
>
>As soon as I suggested this, he backed against the wall, with wild-eyed
>fright, fending me off with his hands as if I were coming at him with a
>large knife, or maybe a red hot branding iron: "No! No! Don't take it away!
>I don't want you to take it away - just help me get back in control - just
>make it be nice again, like it was at first." I tried to explain that he
>could invite the Holy Spirit to come and be with him, in place of this
>dangerous spirit, but he kept begging me not to take his spirit friend away
>from him. When I finally explained that I would not pray without his
>permission, he calmed quickly and dramatically, and was able to go through
>the rest of the admission evaluation without incident.
>
>After completing a careful and thorough evaluation, my honest assessment was
>that he probably was being oppressed by a demonic spirit, and that he
>probably did not have any mental illness.3 But the mental health
>professionals at the state hospital couldn't even consider this possibility,
>so they put him in the next closest diagnostic box. The only symptoms
>contributing to his diagnosis of schizophrenia were his beliefs and
>perceptions regarding this demonic spirit - his beliefs about how he had
>discovered it, his beliefs about his ongoing relationship with it, his
>perceptions that he could see it and hear it, and his beliefs that it was
>trying to get him to harm children. But even though he was otherwise
>completely normal, and had no other signs or symptoms of schizophrenia, the
>mental health professionals involved had concluded that he had chronic
>paranoid schizophrenia on the basis of his "visual hallucinations" (seeing
>the demonic spirit), "auditory hallucinations" (hearing the demonic spirit),
>and "delusions" (all of his beliefs regarding the demonic spirit). Since
>they did not even consider the possibility that the demonic spirit could be
>real, schizophrenia was the best diagnosis they could come up with.4