UPDATED::As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession. - The Washington Post

So Gallagher is in the news again drumming up business and feeding the delusions of the delusional. 

UPDATE:: When exorcists need help, they call him

He also insists that he's on the side of science.

He says he's a stickler for the scientific method, that it teaches people to follow the facts wherever they may lead.

Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in Long Island, he didn't think much about stories of possession. But when he kept seeing cases like Julia's as a professional, he says, his views had to evolve.

"I don't believe in this stuff because I'm Catholic," he says. "I try to follow the evidence."

Being Catholic, though, may help.

Gallagher grew up in a home where faith was taken seriously. His younger brother, Mark, says Gallagher was an academic prodigy with a photographic memory who wanted to use his faith to help people. 

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Wow!!  This makes me embarrassed to admit I at one time I was studying to enter the field of psychiatry. What Gallagher seems to miss and I find egregious, he is victimizing the people he is supposed to be helping.  Belief is a dangerous thing and Gallagher proves this point. 

I am really at a loss with this one,,,

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.,,,

But I believe I’ve seen the real thing. Assaults upon individuals are classified either as “demonic possessions” or as the slightly more common but less intense attacks usually called “oppressions.” A possessed individual may suddenly, in a type of trance, voice statements of astonishing venom and contempt for religion, while understanding and speaking various foreign languages previously unknown to them. The subject might also exhibit enormous strength or even the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of levitation. (I have not witnessed a levitation myself, but half a dozen people I work with vow that they’ve seen it in the course of their exorcisms.) He or she might demonstrate “hidden knowledge” of all sorts of things — like how a stranger’s loved ones died, what secret sins she has committed, even where people are at a given moment. These are skills that cannot be explained except by special psychic or preternatural ability.

As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession. - The Washington Post

America's Justice System Sure Doesn't Know Much Science | WIRED

James Holmes walked into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 carrying three guns including a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more. Nobody, not even his defense attorneys, denied that. But those attorneys still told a jury and a judge that Holmes was not guilty of those crimes—because he was insane. Last month, that jury rejected that assertion, finding Holmes guilty on all counts.

Holmes’ plea didn’t get him off, but it did get people talking about the insanity defense again. It’s a rare move for defense attorneys these days, even quaint sounding. Psychiatrists no longer call patients “insane.” It’s not a clinical diagnosis. Yet the term persists in the courtroom—along with many other practices unsupported by modern psychology and neuroscience.

Americans inherited a legal system shaped by history, not by science. “The legal system is resistant to change and resistant to paying attention to scientific research,” says Adam Benforado, a law professor at Drexel University and author of the recent book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. The system assumes that innocent people don’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. It presumes that eyewitness testimonies are reliable. It counts on the impartiality of jurors.

None of those things are borne out by evidence.


America's Justice System Sure Doesn't Know Much Science | WIRED

Mad Science: The Treatment of Mental Illness Fails to Progress [Excerpt] - Scientific American

As civilized human beings, we like to console ourselves with visions of progress, illusory as that concept often proves to be. Perhaps we have not seen progress in the realms of literature and art (though some would dispute that claim), but surely science moves forward, and medicine too, insofar as it is a science rather than an art. In the developed world, at least, we now enjoy longer, and certainly more materially abundant if not culturally richer and happier lives. Except if we are mad, that is. Modern psychiatry and its potions notwithstanding, one of the more sobering realities about serious mental illness in the twenty-first century is that its sufferers not only die at a much younger age on average than the rest of us (as much as twenty-five years sooner), but also that the incidence of serious illness and mortality in this population has accelerated in recent decades. On this most basic of levels we seem to be regressing.

Psychiatry seems to be in trouble too. The neo-Kraepelinian approach it adopted when DSM III was published in 1980 at first served it well. The reliability and replicability of psychiatric diagnoses increased, and embarrassing disputes about what was wrong with a particular patient receded into the past. Freudians lost the internecine professional war decisively, and psychiatrists embraced once more a biological account of mental disorders that superficially made sense to their medical brethren, however schematic it remained. And the new approach proved extraordinarily attractive to the drug companies, who underwrote the psychiatric research enterprise, and as the years went by, increasingly influenced the very terms in which mental illness was discussed, even the categories of illness that purportedly exist in the world.

Each successive edition of the manual, the revised third edition (III R) of 1987, the fourth edition (IV of 1994) and its ‘text revision’ (IV TR of 2000), adhered to the fundamental approach psychiatry had adopted in 1980, though new ‘illnesses’ were added on each occasion, the definitions of psychopathology were tweaked and the page count mounted. But as ‘illnesses’ proliferated in each revision, and the criteria for assigning a particular diagnosis were loosened, the very problem that had led to the invention of the new versions of the DSM recurred, and major new threats to psychiatric legitimacy surfaced.

[,,,]
Those put in charge of the enterprise announced that the logic that had underpinned the two previous editions was deeply flawed, and they would fix things. Drawing on the findings of neuroscience and genetics, they would move away from the symptom-based system that they now acknowledged was inadequate, and build a manual that linked mental disorders to brain function. They would also take account of the fact that mental disorder is a dimensional, not a categorical kind of thing: a matter of being more or less sane, not a black and white world with sanity in this corner and mental illness in that. It was a grand ambition. The only problem was that it was an ambition impossible to fulfill. Having thrashed about in pursuit of this chimera, those running the project were ultimately forced to concede defeat, and by 2009 they were back to tinkering with the descriptive approach.

Mad Science: The Treatment of Mental Illness Fails to Progress [Excerpt] - Scientific American

An overdue end to cruel conversion therapy for gays | News and Observer News and Observer

Those of us who relied on more old-school psychotherapy were not so cruel, at least not blatantly so. Those with same-sex attractions, so we were taught, suffered from a genuine mental illness that could be cured. Little could we have appreciated that our methods only shamed and coerced their true selves into hiding. It is no wonder – and something for which I feel deep and lasting sorrow – that a generation of people, the ones we were telling ourselves we were helping, suffered so profoundly, many taking their own lives.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article18226631.html#storylink=cpy

,,,
For all the work and research on this subject, and for all the patients I have seen whose identity and orientation remained steadfast, nothing strengthened my resolve to speak out more than when my youngest daughter, a junior in high school at the time, came out to my wife and me. Honestly, we were stunned. Not unlike many other parents, it took months for us to acclimate to her reality. But from that very first telling, one thing was never in question: We loved her unconditionally for who she was, and our love continues for the remarkable person she continues to be.

An overdue end to cruel conversion therapy for gays | News and Observer News and Observer

Persistent Stigma, Skepticism About Mental Illness Causes Real Harm | CommonHealth

But why? Why, in this day and age, does this scenario so stubbornly persist?

I think it’s because plenty of people still feel that psychiatric suffering isn’t real. And this causes genuine harm. If Sally encounters resistance to the fact that she’s suffering, she’ll almost certainly be less likely to seek care. If she feels that her non-psychiatric doctors don’t take her suffering seriously, then she’s going to suffer quietly and dangerously.

There’s even evidence that doctors themselves don’t believe this type of pain is real — and they sometimes wonder whether depression results from a moral failing.

Looking at the problem from another perspective, consider this anonymous comment I got from a medical student in the psychiatry course I teach: “Dear Dr. Schlozman: The psychiatry course convinces even the biggest skeptics.”

This comment, entirely well meaning, is also deceptively profound. Whenever I contemplate the vexing world of stigma with regard to mental health, I think first of this comment.

Let’s deconstruct what this student is saying.

“The psychiatry course convinced skeptics.”

Does the doctor teaching cardiology have to convince skeptics? Does anyone refuse to believe in nephrology? The burdens placed on psychiatric patients stem largely from the skepticism that many in the community, including the medical community, still patently feel and express. Simply put, quite a few health care providers do not believe that many psychiatric illnesses are real. This is despite data-laden policy papers from the Office of the Surgeon General, from the CDC and even from the World Health Organization.

Doctors, policy makers and the general population still have a long way to go toward accepting psychiatric suffering as part of the medical canon.

That’s not to say that we haven’t made huge strides. In fact, one might argue that the increasingly vocal debates that are happening now with regard to psychiatric suffering are happening precisely because we have allowed ourselves to discuss these issues in open forums. To that end, these discussions are absolutely necessary if we’re to move forward.

Persistent Stigma, Skepticism About Mental Illness Causes Real Harm | CommonHealth

Supernatural 'Jinn' Seen as Cause of Mental Illness Among Muslims

Back in early June. I posted about this paper which described the symptomatology of schizophrenia and delusional disorders, talking a little bit about what a “demonic” experience might be like.

It now seems we have another attempt coming from researchers in the Netherlands although this paper seems more focused:

Across societies, beliefs in the supernatural as well as other aspects of culture may influence how mental disorders manifest, the study said. Previous research has found that people with schizophrenia may experience different delusions depending on their cultures. For example, fears about technology and surveillance play a large part in the delusions of people with schizophrenia in the United States. Meanwhile, in Japan, which has an honor-oriented culture, patients' delusions more commonly involve fears about public humiliation.

It may be common for psychiatric patients who are Muslim to attribute their hallucinations or other symptoms to "jinn," the invisible, devilish creatures in Islamic mythology, researchers in the Netherlands have found.

The findings demonstrate one way in which culture may influence how people perceive their psychotic symptoms, and could help Western psychiatrists better understand patients who have an Islamic background.

Moreover, in today's connected world, patients may fuse the symbols from their own backgrounds with those of other cultures to explain their symptoms, study leader Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Groningen, told Live Science.

[,,,]
To get a better idea of how commonly Muslim psychiatric patients consider jinn in the course of their diseases, the researchers looked into the scientific literature. They found 105 articles about jinn and their relationship with mental disorders, including 47 case reports. About 66 percent of those reports included a medical diagnosis. Nearly half of the cases involved a person with schizophrenia or a related disorder, while the rest of the patients had mood disorders, epilepsy or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"The available literature suggests that the attribution of psychiatric symptoms to jinn is common in some Muslim populations," the researchers wrote in their review, published July 30 in the journal Transcultural Psychiatry.

"Since Western health professionals tend to be unfamiliar with this attribution style, diagnosis may prove quite challenging — especially when the patient-physician encounter is already impeded by language problems and cultural differences or biases," the researchers said.

Moreover, findings from several case reports suggested that the attribution of psychiatric symptoms to jinn also affects the treatment and course of patients' mental disorders, the researchers said.

Supernatural 'Jinn' Seen as Cause of Mental Illness Among Muslims

See also:  Real-Life Werewolves: Psychiatry Re-Examines Rare Delusion

ADDENDUM::Journal Under Fire For Linking Schizophrenia to Demonic Possession

Curtis Hart, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Religion and Health and lecturer in public health at Weill Cornell Medical College, told Real Clear Science that he stands behind Irmak’s paper and has no plans to retract it. “The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion,” he said. “The journal does not agree that demons are a real entity.”

Hart might see the paper’s inclusion as an interesting way to ignite debate, but his peers in the medical community question if it’s a useful one. Dr. Joshua Kantrowitz, director of Columbia University’s Lieber Schizophrenia Research Clinic, dismisses Irmack’s argument as “pretty unfortunate.”

“With respect, this is a way to attract eyes to their journal and not necessarily a legitimate scientific debate,” he says. “People with schizophrenia are prescribed antipsychotics, and they work for most. As the article correctly cites, they don’t work for everybody, but I think it’s a pretty big leap to jump to the explanation offered. There didn’t seem to be much actual evidence or science behind what the author was saying.”

Journal Under Fire For Linking Schizophrenia to Demonic Possession

ADDENDUM::RealClearScience - Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons

THE EDITOR OF the Journal of Religion and Health is Dr. Curtis Hart, a lecturer in public health at Weill Cornell Medical College. RealClearScience reached out to him for comment.

"The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion," he said. "The Journal does not agree that demons are a real entity."

There are currently no plans to retract the paper, but two rebuttals are already slated for a future issue, Curtis added. The journal's publisher, Springer, recently made headlines by withdrawing 16 gibberish papers spotted by an independent computer scientist. The nonsense papers were created with a computer program, SciGen.

RCS gave Irmak a chance to defend his paper.

"There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of demons," he admitted. "This is like the argument of creation or evolution. It is a matter of belief and I think the existence of demons cannot be proved by scientific methods."

For the record, there is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence in support of evolution, which is not at all a matter of belief.

Irmak also insisted that readers of his paper watch the Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of genius mathematician John Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia.

"I think the creatures who disturb John Nash are demons," he said.

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/06/published_scientific_paper_blames_schizophrenia_on_demons.html

RealClearScience - Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons

New paper says maybe mental condition really IS demons | Doubtful News

Kudos to Sharon Hill over at Doubtful News for this gem,,,

Long ago, before modern medical understanding, people thought that various conditions such as mental illness and brain disorders like seizures were caused by demons. Those days have long past. Maybe not in the religious-minded. Note that this article comes from High Council of Science, Gulhane Military Medical Academy, Ankara, Turkey. Turkey is a hotbed of Muslim fundamentalism.

The Journal is peer-reviewed including reports on “contemporary modes of religious and spiritual thought with particular emphasis on their relevance to current medical and psychological research.” Articles deal with mental and physical health in relation to religion and spirituality of all kinds. Therefore, that might explain why such a piece is published – that even contemporary (backwards) religions are returning to pre-scientific explanations.

I can’t fathom how such a paper would contain anything but speculation. The medical data nor any other scientific evidence anywhere in no way supports the reality of supernatural entities as a cause of human harm. Belief, however, causes havoc.

I was half tempted to pay the $40 to purchase this paper until reading K Friesen's comment,

,,,it is definitely not peer reviewed. For that matter, there is scarcely anything in the paper – no methods, numbers, statistics, nothing even about “spiritual treatment”. The five pages of this paper (three if you don’t include the abstract and references) basically describe the symptomatology of schizophrenia and delusional disorders, talk a little bit about what a “demonic” experience might be like. To be a bit balanced, this article is under a subheading of “Psychological Exploration”

Sorry forty bucks for five pages of dreck is not worth the price no matter how "enlightening" it may be.

A few thoughts to ponder,,,

A point that HIll makes, "[w]hen people believe this is religious cause, it will encourage exorcisms. Exorcisms are downright deadly." To which Improbable Research, cited by Hill, ends with this question, "The new theory raises an enigmatic question : if medication helps patients, is it acting on the patients themselves, or on the demons which possess them?

It is my question of which came first, religious belief or mental illness? In my humble opinion, the belief that one is demonically possessed is often a symptom of schizophrenia. "My feelings and movements are controlled by others in a certain way” and “They put thoughts in my head that are not mine.” Compare also to what some say in regards to aliens and demonology, Bill Alnor for example in a 2009 lecture [from my other blog].

A second point, if one looks at the references cited by the paper talked about by HIll some of the references are to sources specifically about the Near Eastern or Islamic belief jinn.

Whether Christian or Islamic, belief in demonic possession will lead to catastrophic results as I have many times highlighted.

New paper says maybe mental condition really IS demons | Doubtful News