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