Mental Illness Versus Possession
What is it we call “mental illness,” and what is meant when we speak of “possession?” These represent entirely different frameworks: two lenses through which we attempt to interpret the vast and often inscrutable terrain of the mind. Each lens offers its own advantages, yet both carry limitations that must be acknowledged with care.
The materialist approach views mental illness as a a purely biological condition affected by environment, rooted in genetics, upbringing, and neurochemical imbalances. It is a model that enshrines the requirement of some absoluteness in clarity: this is to say if we can name it, we can fix it. This is tied to the wildly popular modern belief that all phenomena, no matter how complex, are reducible to observable causes. To call something “mental illness” is to imply that it exists within the boundaries of what we can measure, dissect, and treat with purely chemical and tangible means. While originally grounded in a need for measurable outcomes in tangible terms, the necessity for measure of each input into human mental health recovery has been turned toward the extreme.
What happens when patterns of behaviour defy scientific explanations? What happens when a person’s thoughts spiral into obsessions or compulsions the importance of which details depend upon matters no diagnostic manual could ever fully account for? Here is where a more spiritual framework shines. In a spiritual perspective, we do not see these phenomena as isolated defects. What we see are interactions with forces beyond the material, which leave their tell in the spirit. To call it “possession” is to acknowledge things in the spirit influence our minds in ways we cannot fully grasp, whether one wishes to conceive of them as the unseen beings with powers less than God, spiritual archetypes called demons, or noumenal patterns pressing into our collective unconscious. If we drown out anything beyond the mechanistic causation we can see, we plainly lose other definitions.
The tension between these two frameworks is seen by most proponents on both sides as a battle of correctness, but I rather look at it as arts of definition colouring perspective. One seeks to understand through finalising all causality as efficiently as possible while the other seeks to comprehend through a causality beyond the complete understanding of another person. Each offers insights that the other cannot, and both are flawed in that each most commonly presumes that their own framework holds all the answers.
Language is our greatest tool, as also our most dangerous weapon. The words we choose shape both how we see the world but how we act within it. To call something “mental illness” is to frame it as a problem to be solved in a specific way and to call it “possession” is to invite us to consider the forces at work beyond our immediate knowledge or understanding. Exclusivity to either of the frameworks reduces the complexity of human experience and the ability to heal in itself, limiting potential. Dismiss neither, but do not allow either of them to dominate your comprehension of mental conditions.