A Faith Healing: The demons departed

I had been seeing him as an outpatient for about 8 months. He was a pleasant man, and I enjoyed our interactions. He suffered bipolar disorder, but was also substantially over-invested in a constellation of odd religious notions. I use the stilted term “over-invested” because psychiatry has traditionally been very tolerant of religious beliefs. After all, the basic tenets of most religions are seen as completely delusional by non-believers. The position taken by psychiatry is that beliefs held in common by large numbers of people, even if seemingly bizarre, should not be considered as signs of illness, let alone psychosis. Still, every patient and their symptoms needed to be evaluated individually.

My patient was a devout Christian but felt drawn to Judaism. Early in our therapeutic relationship, he told me that he had asked to see me because I was the only Jewish psychiatrist at the hospital. In our monthly visits, he often asked about my being Jewish and expressed his interest in learning to speak Hebrew, studying the Torah, and even converting to Judaism with the aim of becoming a Messianic Jew. Messianic Judaism is a belief system of Jews who remained Jews even after coming to believe that Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead, and was Mankind’s Lord and Savior. While accepting  Jesus,  Messianic Jews retained their Jewish identities and interpreted Christianity in terms of ancient Jewish laws and Old Testament biblical prophecies about the Messiah.

He had originally come to me because he suffered severe mood swings and, when his mood became dark, he would become troubled by what he believed was demonic possession. Still, despite the ups and downs of his illness, he functioned well in society and was able to perform without difficulty what psychiatrists refer to as his “activities of daily living.” There had not been any reason to consider hospitalization.

One morning, as I started my morning rounds on the inpatient ward, I saw his name on the list of overnight admissions. It was an unusual set of circumstances. He had precipitously developed trigeminal neuralgia, an exquisitely painful nerve condition of the face. The pain was so great that he was threatening suicide. He was also quite agitated and would explode into long rants about the demons that possessed him and now subjected him to unspeakable torment. The pain, lack of sleep, and sense of utter powerlessness had conspired to drive him past mere commonly held beliefs into a full-blown hyper-religious, delusional manic psychosis.

I did my best to relieve his nerve pain with the standard treatment, carbamazepine. But he gained little relief. I also added a sedating anti-psychotic medication at night to help him sleep and dampen his delusions of demonic possession. But after a week he was no better. Deep, fixed delusions are rarely much changed by anti-psychotic medication. Indeed, I had long ago come to realize that with such delusions, “Medications lower the volume but don’t change the channel.” He continued to be tormented by pain and delusions, and he remained at such high risk for suicide that discharge was out of the question. Yet, at the same time, there was no basis to force him into staying in the hospital by placing a psychiatric hold. He begged to stay. It was his only refuge.

A second week passed without relief. Failure to improve usually required adjusting this and that dose of medication, and patiently waiting for inevitable results. But his agony continued. His continued suffering only seemed to reinforce his sense of inescapability from the possessing demons. He was getting worse, not better. More often throughout the day he cornered me and obsessively needed to talk about Jesus, Jews, God, Divine punishment, redemption, and the cursed demons.  I had to rethink things. I needed to try something different, but I was at a loss as to what that might be.

Every now and then, I found perverse enjoyment in watching TV faith healers, such as Kathryn Kuhlman, Ernest Angley, and Peter Popoff. I condescendingly found them humorous and entertaining. I recall thinking that Ernest Angley wore the absolute worst toupee I had ever seen, and I wondered why the silly man didn’t simply pray for hair! But I was also keenly aware that those televangelists sometimes did help people in miraculous ways. I was also aware that the power of healing lay not in those faith healers, but in the believers whose strong faith drove them to seek healing from them. My patient’s unshakeable belief in Jesus, demons, and his apparent belief in some kind of magic in Judaism, made him a very good candidate for such healing. I decided to go for it.

When I arrived on the ward the following morning, my patient ran up to me with the same frantic, tormented look on his face. But before he could speak, I slapped my right palm against his chest and loudly sang out the Hebrew prayer recited when one is called to the altar to read from the torah scroll: “Barchu et Adonai hamvorach. Baruch atta Aedonai, eloheinu melech ha-olam, asher ba-char-banu mee-kol ha-a-mim, v’natan lanu et torato. Baruch atta Adonai, notein hatorah!”  I was confident that he had no idea what the words meant, which would make them all the more powerful. Then I looked him squarely in the eyes and said as strongly and fervently as I could, “Demons be gone! You are healed!”

He seemed stunned for a moment. Then he turned and, without a word, slowly walked away from me.  A few minutes later, he came back. He seemed calm and unburdened. There was no longer a wild look of torment on his face. “Dr. Mendelson,” he said, “the demons are gone. I want to go home.” I was both amazed and jubilant but felt the need to restrain my excitement lest he see our seeming therapeutic success to be a surprise to me rather than the expected outcome. Thus, I simply told him I was glad. However, I was also concerned that the rapid reversal of his symptoms might be short-lived. Thus, as a means to postpone discharge until I was more confident in his improvement, I told him that I had other patients to attend to and he would have to wait until the afternoon for me to send him home.  He agreed. Later, in the afternoon, he continued to say that he felt fine. He no longer had any pain or thoughts of suicide, and he wanted to return home. I discharged him.

The next times I saw him as an outpatient he continued to be well, at least as well as he had been before his episode of trigeminal neuralgia. I didn’t speak about the faith healing that had taken place on the ward, mostly out of fear of somehow breaking the spell that had healed him. He didn’t mention it either, though he continued to express deep interest in becoming a Messianic Jew.  A few months later, I was offered a position in a local outpatient clinic that wouldn’t burden me with long hours and on-call duty. At my age, it sounded attractive.  I took the job and said my goodbyes to him and my other patients in their final appointments. Thereafter, I lost track of him.

All in all, I was gratified by my participation in a successful faith healing. I had certainly expanded my therapeutic repertoire! I felt proud and unfettered by dogma. Nonetheless, it also remained clear to me that it was his faith that healed him, not any skill of mine.