The unaddressed problem of spirit entity overshadowing and interference

A new article has come out exposing a popularly little-known but surprisingly widespread "psychiatric/neurological" problem of hearing mysterious sometimes malicious voices, which can very adversely affect the lives of its victims. Not surprisingly, establishment materialist medicine and psychiatry has attempted to explain these cases as essentially broken brain syndromes of various sorts, and to treat them primarily by drug therapy. But such thought to be psychotic hallucinations turn out to generally not respond to such therapy.

Apparently the problem is of such an extent that victims are getting together to try to better understand and deal with the syndrome by other means than the medical establishment presently allows.

My primary comment is that conspicuously absent from the various proposed explanations and therapies is the obvious but scientifically taboo paranormal explanation - some if not most cases may be attempts at malicious overshadowing and control or even posession by nonmaterial "entities" of some sort, primarily the spirits of human dead persons. There is an old tradition of investigation and treatment using this model, going back most notably to the work of expert psychiatrist Carl Wickland M.D. who with his medium wife for many years successfully treated such victims mainly by attempting to actually communicate with the apparent entities and "send them into the light". He wrote the book "Thirty Years Among the Dead". His method of treatment was very much more successful than the modern physicalist/neuropsychiatric approach.

Description of this work from Amazon:

"Wickland treated many patients suffering from mental illness of all kinds, and after many years experience came to the conclusion that a number of patients he treated had 'attachments;' by that he meant that spiritual entities had attached themselves to unwitting mortals and influenced them (often) in the worst kind of way-leading them to alcoholism, madness, and occasionally murder. Wickland stated at the time; Spirit obsession is a fact - a perversion of a natural law - and is amply demonstrable. This has been proven hundreds of times by causing the supposed insanity or aberration to be temporarily transferred from the victim to a psychic sensitive who is trained for the purpose, and by this method ascertain the cause of the psychosis to be an ignorant or mischievous spirit, whose identity may frequently be verified. Having come to the 'spirit obsession' conclusion, Wickland and his wife set up a rescue circle, with Mrs. Wickland acting as the medium, and they set about communicating with lost souls who had passed away and were unaware of their post physical death condition and often in denial due to dogmatic religious and equally dogmatic atheist beliefs. In the introduction of the book the author writes, The change called death, the word is a misnomer-universally regarded with gloomy fear, occurs so naturally and simply that the greater number, after passing out of the physical are not aware that the transition has been made, and having no knowledge of a spiritual life they are totally unconscious of having passed into another state of being. Deprived of their physical sense organs, they are shut out from the physical light, and lacking, a mental perception of the high purpose of existence, these individuals are spiritually blind and find themselves in a twilight condition-the outer darkness...and linger in the realm known as the Earth sphere."

It is very sad that Wickland's work has rather predictably been totally ignored in the years since due to the closed-minded materialist scientism of the establishment scientific community. This has resulted in so much needless suffering. In this case the prevalent dug-in scientism of the establishment has had a real and terrible human cost rather than being just an intellectual "culture war".

Recently there has been at least a little progress in this area, but it is still far short of a recognition of and treatment for the true cause of many or most cases of this condition. The new article goes into this. 

Unfortunately, this moderate progress is still inadequate, since it doesn't get to the probable true cause of much of the problem, which is malicious/deluded entity interference from a spiritual afterlife realm.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-psychiatr...ear-voices

"Before about 2000, (people with debilitating apparent psychotic neuropsychriatric delusions and hallucinations of persecution by "voices")....had few options. They could turn to a psychiatrist, or spiral further into isolation, fear and paranoia. But the advent of the personal computer and the availability of the internet changed that. People like Luca were now communicating with each other, finding parallels between their experiences, and trying to track down who was doing this to them.

Hence was born the targeted individual (TI) community: a group of people who openly shared their experiences of high-tech harassment and organised stalking.
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Though the medical narrative helps some, research is showing just how stigmatising and disempowering it is. Some get the message that their brain is broken and that they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions. Many are put on antipsychotic drugs with debilitating side-effects.

The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques.
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(A third, minority sort of non-materialist approach to these "disorders") saw, in madness, a spiritual crisis or ‘spiritual emergency’, a term coined in the 1980s by Stanislav and Christina Grof but with roots in the work of Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow. In this view, the ‘self’ is a mere drop in a vast sea of intelligence, consciousness and love. What if what we call insanity is a form of unmediated contact with this cosmic intelligence?"

I liked the Aeon article overall.

While they didn't touch on the idea of possession, the author did mention the issue of materialist bias:

A second approach sees psychosis as a ‘spiritual emergency’. This view is advanced today by organisations like Safely Held Spaces and the International Spiritual Emergence Network. While some of a materialist mindset scoff at the idea that psychosis has a spiritual dimension, these framings have powerful practical benefits. Cross-cultural research on schizophrenia has shown that the way culture makes sense of voice-hearing impacts both the content and the emotional tone of the voices. In the US, where voice-hearing in the context of schizophrenia is framed as a symptom of a disease, voices are experienced as more invasive, hostile and distressing. In parts of India, Ghana and China, where voices tend to be understood as belonging to deceased ancestors or other spirits, voices are experienced as more benevolent and less scary. Some voice-hearers have found that, simply by adopting a curious and compassionate attitude to what the voices are trying to say, they become less threatening and more supportive.

[Laird]

A new article has come out exposing a popularly little-known but surprisingly widespread "psychiatric/neurological" problem of hearing mysterious sometimes malicious voices, which can very adversely affect the lives of its victims.

Is this really little-known? Isn't voice-hearing stereotypical in the public imagination of those diagnosed with "psychosis" or, when it persists, "schizophrenia"?

Anyhow, that's a by-the-by.

As did Sci, I liked the article overall. There was a lot I related to. I'd not heard of the "targeted individuals" framing and community, but "targeted individual" does seem to be an apt descriptor regardless of who is doing the targeting and by whatever means, whether fellow humans with human technology, spirits with psychic means, aliens with some combination, or something else. It would of course be helpful to know.

I still haven't read Thirty Years Among the Dead but, as I've mentioned in the past, I have read a few books on Spirit Release Therapy, which runs along similar lines. I'm by now kind of skeptical of the idea that getting rid of these entities could be as simple as described, but I'd be willing to give it a try.

I liked the Aeon article overall.

While they didn't touch on the idea of possession, the author did mention the issue of materialist bias:

Yes, they do mention that this psychological phenomenon might have a spiritual dimension and that the mere mention of that is opposed by materialistic conventional science, but it's only in the context of seeing this way of looking at it as being perhaps of therapeutic benefit. Many things not real can be of therapeutic benefit, such as placebo effect in many cases - what's important is the net positive effect on the patient. This approach again refuses to even mention the possibility of the psychological phenomenon being a real actual influencing by spirit entities.