I went back and read your posts. You agreed with ViaCrucis on a number and points and I wrongly assumed you agreed with his explicit statement that if a psychotic responds to meds, he/she cannot be demon possessed. Sorry about that.
To be clear, I did post that unresponsiveness to medication would be symptomatic, but it would not be by itself proof of demon posession; there would have to be other behaviors like disturbing changes in personality, a fear of holy objects including those concealed from the view of the person, xenoglossia, and other indicators historically associsted with possession.
One particularly severe case, which exhibits the full range of demonic symptoms, is that of multiple posessions which were exorcised by Christ our God, who loves mankind, which is described in all three canonical Gospels, however, the Gospel According to St.
Mark 5:1-20 provides the most detail. We see the demons who identified themselves as Legion recognize our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, and demonstrate an obvious fear of Him and resentment towards His presence, in addition to physical violence requiring restraint, and as narrated in the more detailed account in
Mark 5:1-20 , self-harm (a fact not specificslly recorded in the Gospels according to Saints Matthew and Luke).
It is also interesting to note thar physical restraint (which is to this day used as a psychiatric nursing technique and in jails as a means of allowing hyper-agitated patients or inmates to simmer down) and presumably any other medical interventions which may have been available in 1st century Judaea (ancient medicine, although based on flawed concepts and obviously incredibly primitive versus modern medicine, was not entirely devoid of efficacy) were ineffective.
The most striking symptom however seems to be that the demons posessing the man were in total control, in the driver’s seat, so to speak, until they were driven out by our Lord, rendering him a hapless victim with no agency: the wicked demons in their vicious cruelty went so far as to cause the poor man to inflict painful cuts on his person. In reading all three of the accounts in their respective Synoptic Gospels one gets a beautiful sense of liberation from his reaction to the providential deliverance provided by our Savior, although to me this feels particularly strong and salient in the highly detailed narrative in
Mark 5:1-20 *
This also takes us to a key feature of successful exorcisms: the demon should be gone, although our Lord does warn us of the possibility of demons possessing previously exorcised people.
Now, there are countermeasures that were instituted by the Early Church against posession and which are maintained by the traditional churches**: Firstly, traditional churches exorcise during baptism since demons in their cruelty do not even spare infants. Secondly, the Eastern churches*** chrismate immediately after Baptism, which is considered to be the Seal of the Holy Spirit.
Do you believe a psychotic who has responded to meds can still be demon possessed?
Firstly, I have to say with humility that don’t know, either medically (I am obviously not a psychiatrist), or theologically (one of our tradition minded Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Confessional Lutheran or Anglican members might know what the Fathers of the Early Church (such as St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. John Chrysostom, St. Athanasius the Apostolic****, St. Cyril the Great, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Vincent of Lerins, St. John Cassian, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. John Damascene, St. Ephrem the Syrian, and Mor Severus of Antioch) and the Orthodox Holy Tradition, the Roman Magisterium, the Lutheran Confessions, or distinguished Anglican theologians such as the Tractarians late 19th century or a contemporary Anglo-Catholic theologian such as Dr. Rowan William say on this issue.
That being the case, if I had to guess, I would say yes, a person can be posessed by demons while suffering from a mental illness. So the mental illness would respond to treatment from medication and therapy, but the demonic possession would not. The tricky question is whether or not medication and therapy could be deemed effective while possession was ongoing in such a case.
Conversely, it is possible in such a horrible case to consider that the demons might also seek to trick psychiatrists into thinking someone is insane as a means of tormenting them in secular countries, as opposed to those few countries where a mental hospital into which someone would be committed by the state, as opposed to a private facility, still might be run by nuns and feature crosses on the wall.
Perhaps we should lobby that all mental patients should by law, before being committed, sectioned as they say in the UK, or put on a psychiatric hold, should be observed (covertly I think) by at least one qualified Christian exorcist, ideally an ecumenical group of exorcists, who ideally might be indistinguishable from nurses, but who might if certain criteria were present be allowed to introduce a holy object, perhaps one hidden from view, to rule out possession. The trick would be to avoid an insane-but-not-posessed patient from seeing a holy object and becoming fixated on it.
* That the Gospel according to St. Mark features a longer and more detailed account of this incident is interesting to note, because usually the other two synoptic Gospels (according to St. Matthew and St. Luke) provide longer and more detailed accounts, which is a popular argument for Markan priority, which I myself historically have believed, albeit with the caveat that a lost proto-Matthew written in Aramaic with Hebrew religious terminology, like the Book of Daniel, albeit with Judean Aramaic or an early Syriac dialect rather than the much older dialect. This book was not translated into Greek, since we know that the Gospel According to St. Matthew is not a translation, but rather one might assume St. Matthew perhaps wrote the former and narrated the latter to someone fluent in both Koine Greek and Aramaic, such as a Hellenic Jew, like St. Paul or St. Luke. However, increasingly I have come to realize that Markan priority is not backed by any solid evidence, and is a position advocated by modernists; while the Gospel According to St. Mark may have been the first written in Greek, the brevity that characterizes it
** Churches with baptismal exorcisms include the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox as my friends
@prodromos @HTacianas and
@dzheremi can attest (also as far as I know the Assyrians;
@Pavel Mosko would know), the Roman Catholics (as
@chevyontheriver @concretecamper and
@Michie can attest), Confessional Lutherans like my friends
@MarkRohfrietsch and
@ViaCrucis, and also I would assume high church Anglicans such as Anglo-Catholics (perhaps
@Shane R or
@PloverWing or another Anglican member might know). My understanding is that the traditional Old Catholic liturgy, which was a vernacular translation of the Tridentine liturgy; I think our only Old Catholic member is
@kiwimac so perhaps he might be able to confirm this, and whether or not the current Old Catholic liturgies still retain a baptismal exorcism (since over the years the various Old Catholic jurisdictions ihave developed their liturgies in a distinctive way).
*** The Eastern churches I refer to here include the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, and the sui juris Eastern Catholics such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the Ruthenian Greek Catholics, the Coptic Catholics, Syriac Catholics, Armenian Catholics, Chaldean Catholics and Maronite Catholics, among many others), as well as the Western Rite Vicarates in some of the Eastern Orthodox churches.
**** St. Athanasius did discuss demons extensively in his biography of St. Anthony the Great; I can’t recall if he discusses them in On The Incarnation, but regardless of whether or not he provides information on whether demons possess those who are mentally ill, I strongly recommend the aforementioned Life of Anthony as a source of deep knowledge concerning demonic activity, owing to the fact that St. Anthony, after he sold all that he owned and retreated to live a life of prayer in an abandoned Egyptian tomb (now part of a Coptic Orthodox church), experienced extreme demonic temptations. This escalated to brutal physical attacks against his person, attacks on the structure to frighten him, followed by more temptation in the form of bowls of treasure as St. Anthony retreated into the desert, and then the devil himself appeared as a small boy.
Even after that triumph which required that he not acknowledge it lest he fall into pride and thus delusion, St. Anthony’s vocation as a solitary was threatened by the throng of people who, somehow hearing of his holiness, followed him into the desert, wherein he had to resist the temptation to succumb to hubris and leave his life of solitary prayer interrupted only occasionally by encounters with other Desert Fathers***** in order to lead this community of willing disciples. Lesser men in such a position have become cult leaders.******
***** Most notably St. Paul the Hermit, who preceded St. Anthony into the desert and lived at an oasis, dependent entirely on God for survival. Birds brought St. Paul bread to eat, and when he died, he was buried in St. Anthony’s presence by two lions who he had befriended him (befriending wild animals is common among hermits; St. Seraphim of Sarov who lived around the turn of the 19th century was known for being visited by a friendly bear.
****** Aside from obvious frauds like L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, and Mary Baker Eddy, one can find examples of genuine mystics who succumbed to temptation and perpetrated great evil, for example, Muhammed, who while engaged in solitary prayer I believe actually came under the influence of a demon impersonating St. Gabriel the Archangel; and the Hindu scholar and guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who was obviously corrupted by the fabulous wealth offered to him, and who later renamed himself “Osho” (a Japanese word used to refer to Buddhist monks, derived from a Sanskrit word meaning master or teacher) after being deported from the US for immigration fraud, with members of his organization implicated and in some cases convicted of bombings, assasination attempts, and the first ever bio-terror attack on US soil in the Dalles, Oregon (well documented in the Netflix series
Wild Wild Country).
