When Psychiatry Faces the Inexplicable. Two Doctors Delve Into Exorcisms; Both Confirm What the Church Says: The Devil Exists – ZENIT

(ZENIT News / Madrid, 07.22.2026).- The modern debate over demonic possession rarely takes place where one might expect it. It is not necessarily found in the world of sensationalist horror films or sensational television. Increasingly, it is being discussed by physicians who have spent their professional lives studying the human mind—and who say that, in a small number of cases, the psychiatric explanation does not appear to be sufficient.

The latest voice to enter this difficult territory is José Miguel Gaona, a Spanish forensic neuropsychiatrist whose recent book, Possession, is the result of five years of research and runs to almost 1,000 pages. His conclusions are striking precisely because they come from a doctor who initially approached exorcism without any intention of validating a supernatural explanation.

Gaona first became involved in the subject roughly 15 years ago, after witnessing an exorcism involving an adolescent. His initial interest was entirely medical. He wanted to study human behavior and, by his own account, did not initially consider the supernatural dimension. His perspective changed gradually after he attended courses at the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum in Rome and later received permission to observe a number of exorcisms, including instruction from the renowned exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth.

His conclusion is carefully framed but unequivocal: he believes that an objective evil force exists.

That position does not mean, however, that he regards every person claiming to be possessed as a victim of demonic activity. Quite the opposite. According to Gaona, psychiatry can explain the overwhelming majority of such cases. He estimates that only around 3 to 5 percent fall into the category of phenomena that remain outside the established psychiatric classifications.

This distinction is central to the Catholic approach. The Church does not treat exorcism as a substitute for medical diagnosis. In ordinary circumstances, a person who believes he or she is possessed should first be evaluated by medical and mental-health professionals. Only when a plausible natural explanation has been seriously considered—and cannot adequately account for the phenomena—can an exorcist begin the appropriate ecclesial process.

The Church’s own rules are deliberately cautious for precisely this reason. A genuine exorcism is not a public spectacle, and the rite is normally conducted discreetly, without cameras or an audience. The caution is not a sign of disbelief in the supernatural; it is also a safeguard against misdiagnosis, exploitation and the spiritual harm that can occur when mental illness is mistaken for possession.

Gaona nevertheless says that some cases have confronted him with phenomena he has been unable to explain conventionally. He recalls one exorcism in which he had the impression that an adolescent was becoming lighter and beginning to detach from the floor. In another case, he says, he witnessed what appeared to be the sudden materialization of metallic objects. He acknowledges the possibility of deception and says that, as a scientist, he has repeatedly questioned his own observations.

But some episodes, he argues, were difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ordinary performance. He also describes cases involving a marked rejection of religious material, sudden and apparently disproportionate physical strength, and the ability to produce language unknown to the person concerned—a phenomenon known in psychology as xenoglossy.

One of the cases he recalls involved a girl weighing approximately 40 kilograms who, he says, lifted a priest’s assistant into the air.

These accounts are extraordinary. They are also precisely the kind of claims that require caution. An individual testimony, however sincere or impressive, is not the same as independently verified scientific evidence. The fact that a physician cannot explain an event does not, by itself, prove a supernatural cause. Yet the opposite conclusion is equally unwarranted: that every unusual experience must automatically be classified as psychosis, schizophrenia or another psychiatric disorder.

That is the point made by Richard Gallagher, an American psychiatrist trained at Princeton and Yale who teaches at New York Medical College and Columbia University. Over approximately 25 years, Gallagher says he has studied around 100 cases that he regarded as genuine examples of what he calls full-scale possession and attended roughly another hundred exorcisms as an observer.

His own initial skepticism was reportedly overcome after two prominent American exorcists brought him cases that he found impossible to dismiss as ordinary psychiatric disorders. Gallagher has described observing individuals with little formal education apparently speaking Latin and responding to prayers in ways he considered difficult to explain through known psychiatric mechanisms.

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His position is not that science should be abandoned. It is precisely the opposite. Gallagher has insisted that he believes in science, teaches at a medical university and relies on scientific knowledge every day. His argument is that scientific inquiry should not be confused with materialism—the philosophical conviction that only material causes can exist.

That distinction is important in the debate over possession. Science can investigate symptoms, neurological activity, behavior and psychological disorders. But the question of whether every possible reality can be reduced to the categories currently available to science is a philosophical question as well as a scientific one.

Gallagher’s work has received support from Joseph English, former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at New York Medical College, who has argued that reports of such phenomena continue to occur and cannot simply be dismissed through simplistic medical or psychiatric explanations.

At the same time, the Catholic Church’s caution is reinforced by psychiatrists who work closely with exorcists. Luigi Janiri, a psychiatrist at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital and a professor at the Catholic University, has stressed that only a minority of people who believe they are possessed are actually considered to be so. In the vast majority of cases, he says, psychiatric conditions are involved.

For Janiri, the answer is not to choose between psychiatry and exorcism, but to improve the competence of both. Psychiatrists should understand the criteria that may indicate a case requiring the attention of an exorcist, while exorcists should receive sufficient training in psychopathology to recognize when a person needs psychiatric care.

That model may offer the most responsible way through a subject easily distorted by both credulity and contempt. The Catholic tradition does not require every strange behavior to be attributed to Satan, just as a doctor should not assume that every reality outside a familiar diagnostic category is therefore unreal.

The testimony of Gaona and Gallagher does not constitute proof of demonic possession in the scientific sense. Nor does it justify turning exorcism into entertainment. But it does raise a question that modern medicine, religion and philosophy have not definitively settled: whether a complete account of the human person can be achieved by examining only the brain and behavior.

For the Church, the answer is no. And for two experienced psychiatrists who have spent decades observing some of the most unusual cases imaginable, the evidence they have encountered has led them to a conclusion that is uncomfortable for a strictly materialist worldview: in a small number of cases, the possibility of an objective spiritual evil cannot simply be dismissed.

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