"The Spirit of God Left Him:" When Mental Illness and Demonic Obsession Meet

Last night as I was helping my son prepare for his first Confession, and we were going through an examination of conscience in his St. Joseph First Communion book, I realized I have been a little sloppy in my own EOCs. I have a bad memory, and yet I don't write my sins down typically. I go through a general Examination of Conscience in my head, but not in fine detail. When I do go to Confession, I don't withhold anything intentionally, but cover myself with "for all these sins and those sins I can't remember, I humbly beg pardon, penance, and absolution" on account of my forgetfulness.

But last night I decided to join my son in writing down my sins, and using a more thorough Examination of Conscience. I said we would burn the papers in the outdoor fireplace together after we finished making our Confessions and received absolution (which we did). There is something about writing down sins, and confessing them with the lips, that makes it real in a way, something I think many Protestants miss out on without the benefit of the Sacrament. The taste of holy shame on our lips as the words are spoken, like a burning crimson ember, turns to sweetness when the Lord extinguishes it with a breath in absolution. Then we are filled with the Holy Spirit to begin our lives anew, white robes and all, ready to die and ready to live.

In digging deeper last night than I normally might, I unearthed some sins that I may have confessed and been forgiven of, but which still haunted me because I did not perhaps lay them out in as much detail as was warranted, given how shameful they were (I should mention that I do not struggle with scrupulosity, OCD, or feeling unforgiven).

Of course, those sins are for the Lord's eyes only, and I do not plan to go into detail about them. But it was from a chapter in my life in which, I believe, I actually went through a mild form of demonic obsession that coincided with a period of acute diagnosed mental illness. In fact, I speculate that it was not being in a state of grace that opened up a spiritual wound which got infected, and my mind was leveraged against me during this period by demonic forces.

I am very careful in sharing my own testimonies of God's grace and redemption, my particular struggles, and trying to do so for the glory of God. Not because I am afraid to share some personal things, but because I don't want to generalize what I have experienced as a proscription for others. My situation is unique in some ways and ordinary in others; I would hope relatable on some fronts, and maybe particular to my circumstances on others.

This can be a very difficult area in which to tread because of symptomatic overlap. It needs to be stated that mental illness is usually in its own diagnostic category (psychiatric) and that spiritual issues should be dealt with spiritually (via the sacraments, confession, consultation with clergy and spiritual directors, etc).

It is when spiritual malaise and mental malaise intersect in a kind of Venn diagram of illness that it can be very difficult to discern root causes and treatments. Some fundamentalists will put forth that mental illness is a sin problem, not a mind problem; Psychiatric professionals would purport that there is no spiritual element to strictly neurological or psychiatric conditions. I think both are not entirely accurate. There are spiritual elements at play, as well as biological/neurological/psychiatric. The intersection is where it gets muddy.

A passage from scripture that has always stayed with me because of it's frightful imagery appears in 1 Samuel 16:14

"Now the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord terrorized him." 

And later in 1 Sam 19:9-10:

"But an evil spirit from the Lord came on Saul as he was sitting in his house with his spear in his hand. While David was playing the lyre, Saul tried to pin him to the wall with his spear, but David eluded him as Saul drove the spear into the wall."

We know, that when we commit moral sin, the spirit of God departs from us, as it did to Saul. We are spiritually naked and out in the wind, so to speak, vulnerable and in danger of damnation. I was very much in a state of mortal sin prior to the onset of my first severe psychiatric episode. When the episode itself hit like a tidal wave (acute mania followed by psychosis), the spiritual vulnerability was leveraged in obsessive religiosity.

But it was not the holy kind. In fact, there were unmentionable instances of blatant blasphemy that I was driven to, not unlike Saul being driven by an evil spirit to pin David to the wall with a spear. I cannot use the illness itself to release me from the hook, though it may have mitigated culpability to an extent. But because I was not in a state of grace (my choice, my will, my volition), I had made a home for demons to dwell and force my hand against the Lord God, my Savior himself. Part of me would say today, "I did not know what I was doing." But that was the scary part. Who was moving my will? Who was forcing my hand? Who was throwing the spear? There was no grace in me--I was spiritually dead. And so in that vacuum, a nest was made.

In recounting my past sins of such blasphemy--which I had confessed before but which now seemed so grievous that I'm not sure I confessed them in the amount of detail that should have been warranted--I was able to verbalize in shame, feeling the burn, and rooting out the vestiges of straw and bark from the nest itself. I may not have been in my right mind, but I was not in a right spirit either, and that I had brought on myself through disobedience. The danger was acute. I was driven to the brink of suicide in the ensuing crash following these psychic highs, in which I had visions of "a black man, a shadow figure, a faceless one, wearing a hat and calling me to another side" from which only God's merciful grace (of which I had not merit to) kept me from crossing over to.

Part of "tripping into" this state of moral desolation in which the spirit of God is not living within a person (mortal sin) is so commonplace today, I fear for the vulnerability of the mind of those going through it, including my own. Which is why I am so careful, and so grateful, to have been shown (by grace) what needs to be avoided, and what needs to be embraced, to be in a state of grace. Because I truly believe that a state of grace is what fortifies my mind against unwelcome guests, the same spirits that afflicted Saul and drove him mad. I have had no symptoms of psychiatric malaise, despite a severe and verified clinical diagnosis, in almost ten years, and I attribute this in part due to that indwelling grace that was not killed off by mortal sin.

But I am acutely aware, too, that I need to be vigilant about the scummy buildup of venial sins on my soul that can make me and others more susceptible to mortal sin. Again, this is not a matter of obsession or scrupulosity, but tempered periodic soul scrubbing by the Divine Physician himself every few weeks in the Church's gift of the Sacrament of Confession. As I have stated in past conversations and writings, I still attend to the psychiatric preconditions necessary to stay healthy (medication, exercise, diet, sleep, doctor's visits, etc) to keep that "control group" in check. If I'm psychologically healthy and spiritually in trouble, the one can affect the other. Both are within my power, to a degree, due to the grace of baptism (the will) and knowledge (knowing what I need to do to stay healthy) so we don't have a repeat episode of what happened fifteen years ago. I don't every want to go through that again, while never wanting to forget the abomination of desolation that was my soul when not in a state of grace, and a nest of demons living in my inner being compelling me to act contrary to the virtues by the forcing and misappropriation of my mind and will. It is so very dangerous to give them any footing in the soul, which is why I try to be vigilant in staying close under the mantle of Our Lady and with the Cross every before my eyes. I know what's at stake, and the mind is an existential battleground where war is waged, a war against my very self, which I am not strong enough to withstand on my own. Without grace, I am doomed. If the Spirit of God leaves me, I am indeed a mad man in the making, hunting down the pious servants of God with deranged eyes, seeking to pin them to the wall with jagged spears, to crucify the saints and betray Christ himself. I can't afford that. So, I hope you will forgive me for treating the stakes very high in this battlefield of the mind. May God be praised, may His Holy Name be praised, that He extinguishes the burning ember of shame and we might taste the sweet fragrance of divine forgiveness, and be welcomed back into His friendship, restored to a right spirit, and a sound mind.