The extent of the influence of earthbound spirits on the general population remains unknown. Spiritual infections probably account for at least a minority of cases, and, (I believe), are a factor in many cases of the most egregious criminal and aberrant behavior.
Some modern psychiatrists have had remarkable success in treating certain cases of delusional mental illnesses by using a phenomenological approach that treats the hallucinations themselves as independent personalities. Even if the psychiatrists themselves do not believe in independent spirits, these modalities have a remarkable cure rate. The most well-known of these modalities is past life regression therapy. This is a subject that will be treated in chapter 22 under the heading of reincarnation.
However, there is another less well known psychiatric modality that treats mental illness as if it were caused by discarnate spirits. In layman’s terms, the patient’s hallucinations are treated as if they were real personalities belonging to discarnate spirits who are infecting the patient’s mind and causing his or her mental illness. By talking to these entities, and treating them as if they were real people, the psychiatrist may be able to persuade them to leave, thus allowing the patient to recover from his delusions.
One such psychotherapist is Adam Crabtree who wrote a rather interesting account in the early 1980’s of some of his cases in a book entitled Multiple Man. Crabtree makes no claims about the reality of discarnate spirits, but his approach seems to work and the results are intriguing.
Many therapists use hypnosis to regress patients to past lives in an often successful attempt to relieve them of their psychiatric problems. Their use of this technique has implications concerning the existence of discarnate spirits and their involvement in the production of mental illness. This aspect is more thoroughly discussed in chapters 21 and 22 which deal with reincarnation.