The Devil’s Role In Mental Illness

He was 23 years old with a rich ethnic heritage and identity that he said gave him strength.  He looked like any one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of “youths” you could find on the streets.  A couple of tattoos. The kind I would see when I was driving with my husband and think sometimes “wow, it was so much easier in the days of Marlon Brando movies.” I would have preferred a handsome renegade in a leather jacket to this obese, angry, unkempt person who clearly did not want to talk to anybody, including me. He was not my patient.  A frustrated therapist asked me to see him because no medications had worked on him.  She had expected me to come up with a miracle drug we could get samples.

He told me the same thing, over and over again, that he was doomed, that nobody could help him, that I was a nice lady, nicer than most, but I was wasting my time just like the rest of them.

He heard voices, always angry and deprecating voices, telling him he was going to die, that he was no good and deserved to be killed.  Many times, in his life, he had attempted to prove the voices correct.

He had a history of multiple suicide attempts.  It was an amazement of sorts that he was alive at all.  He had lived part of his life in Los Angeles, where an “easy” suicide attempt could involve provoking a rival gang and standing where you could be easily shot.

I remembered having seen someone in Montana, who had done something similar with the police.  Pretending like he wanted to harm them and using a fake or no weapon.

Both people had ended up with flesh wounds, and seen me still very much alive.

I tried every trick I knew to get my obese ethnic with the “Born to die” attitude to talk. I pried out his story with a crowbar, and this is what I got.

His mother and aunt had been conjurers of Catholic demons.  I recognized some of the names he cited, from “spells” which probably went back to the middle ages.  At any rate, he was convinced they were strong. Once, when he was six or seven (the age of beginning schooling, socialization; when people start assimilating the “rules” of how to behave) his aunt had kissed him on the cheek and told him she had marked him for the devil, whose minions could now find him and take him for their use.  She told him there would be certain material rewards for this.  He told me some of her predictions had “materialized;” enough to convince him of the truth of her program for him.  He felt a little “guilty” for opening up to me, but I had been doing some emotional freedom technique with it, hoping it would be curative.

The few times in my life that this technique had failed me, it had been because the patient had a stronger pre-existing belief system. I do believe that belief is the strongest force on this earth.  It makes wars and suicide bombers and it had surely made this treatment-resistant patient.

He was open to the idea of exorcism.  I had been this route, but not in a system like the one I was in then. I was paid to be a pill-pusher.  So I talked to the therapist about how to find a friendly priest.  The Catholic Church had dealt with such cases before. I explained to her it was not a question of if the agency or she were for or against religion.  I had seen too many poor and desperate people who were alive and functioning only because Catholicism was inspiring, and worked for them.  This was where the patient was at, and we had to go where the patient was at.  At least I could make her understand this was the spirit of Milton Erickson, a powerful therapist and educator, widely read on the west coast and perhaps all the world.

She was so disappointed I did not have a miracle drug.  She found it hard to listen, it seemed, when I told her of cases where the “wrong” drug had worked, simply because the patient had believed in it.

Weeks later, when I realized that she had not spoken to me of the patient, I asked.  She told me she did not think his Catholic belief was really that strong.  So she had done something different (and less time consuming, I thought).  She had simply yelled at him that this whole belief thing was ridiculous, and he should cut it out.  He could outfox this system by denying it.  She alleged the voices had stopped and she would keep this up and he was “on his way.”

I was stuck in an “academic” point of view.  Delusions change; the devil is less popular than space aliens. But I had been beginning to wonder about what a diabolical delusion really meant. Although I knew little about it as it was far from my domain of practice, I even started thinking a little of some of the work of David Bakan, who had synthesized psychology with religious concepts. Something about Catholic “community” and “agency” as the work of the devil.  Maybe an “intellectual” exorcism, although this young man was decidedly no intellectual.

The “academic” lost to the exigencies of community mental health. Other doctors doubtless tried new medications, and the therapist kept yelling.

I do not know if or how long this “worked” if at all. I only know that I must painfully write off what I consider false solutions that are products of a community mental health system and should not be accepted as indicative of the power of human knowledge in any way, shape or form.

She never followed through with the Catholic Church.