What Two Psychiatrists Saw at Exorcisms, and What It Means for Catholic Clinical Care

José Miguel Gaona, a Spanish forensic neuropsychiatrist, first encountered an exorcism about fifteen years ago, called in to observe an adolescent's case as a clinician rather than a believer. His interest at first was purely clinical: understanding how people behave under extreme conditions, not endorsing what the Church says happens in that room.[^1]

Five years of research followed: courses at the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum in Rome, and eventually the chance to sit in on a number of exorcisms himself, including time learning directly from Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's best-known exorcist.[^1] The result, a nearly 1,000-page book titled Possession, reaches a conclusion Gaona did not set out to find: an objective evil force exists.

He's precise about the limits of that claim. By his own estimate, psychiatry accounts for 95 to 97 percent of possession cases: dissociative disorders, psychotic episodes, trauma, personality pathology. The remaining 3 to 5 percent, he says, don't fit any established psychiatric category.[^1] Some of what he describes is genuinely strange: an adolescent who seemed to grow lighter and begin lifting off the floor, metallic objects that appeared to materialize, a 40-kilogram girl who lifted a grown man off his feet, people producing language they had never learned, a phenomenon psychology calls xenoglossy. He doesn't rule out having been fooled, and says he has pushed back against his own conclusions more than once, the way any working scientist should. Even so, some episodes, he maintains, were hard to reconcile with any ordinary explanation.[^1]

He isn't alone in reaching this by the same route. Richard Gallagher, a board-certified psychiatrist trained at Princeton and Yale who teaches at New York Medical College and Columbia, spent twenty-five years studying roughly 100 cases he came to regard as genuine possession, after directly observing about 100 more exorcisms.[^2] Gallagher is emphatic that none of this is an argument against science. He has said as much himself: his point is that scientific inquiry shouldn't be confused with materialism, the philosophical claim that only material causes exist.[^1] Two physicians, working independently and decades apart, arrived at nearly identical estimates of how rare these cases actually are.

What the Church already requires

None of this happens outside a structure. Canon law permits only priests with a bishop's explicit permission to perform an exorcism, and the Church's own 1999 rite directs that a person believed to be possessed first be evaluated to rule out a psychiatric or medical cause.[^3] That isn't a modern concession to secular skepticism. It's built into the Church's own procedure because Catholic anthropology treats the person as one body-soul unity, not two separate systems running in parallel — a clinician who treats the soul as a metaphor is working from a narrower anthropology than the Church's own, not a more rigorous one.[^4]

An actual model for how this should work

Luigi Janiri, who directs psychiatry at Rome's Gemelli Hospital and teaches at the Catholic University, has spent years working alongside exorcists and states plainly what that collaboration should look like: not a choice between psychiatry and exorcism, but improved competence on both sides. Psychiatrists need to recognize the signs that a case may fall outside their competence; exorcists need real training in psychopathology so they can recognize when the person in front of them needs a doctor, not a rite.[^1]

That division of labor has concrete content. A psychologist working a potential possession case does differential assessment first and seriously: ruling out dissociative disorders, psychotic-spectrum conditions, trauma-related presentations, and personality disorders that can produce altered states or an apparent loss of control. Gaona's 3 to 5 percent figure only means something if the other 95 to 97 percent were actually screened, not waved through. Beyond that, the clinician builds the exorcist a real clinical picture: history, attachment patterns, trauma exposure, current functioning — material the priest has no way to gather alone. And the clinician stays present through what can be a months-long process, not adjudicating the supernatural question but offering the person a steady, non-reactive relationship the rite itself doesn't provide.

Where that leaves the question

None of this proves demonic possession in a scientific sense, and neither Gaona nor Gallagher claims it does. What their independent, decades-apart testimonies establish is a real gap: a small number of cases that two experienced clinicians, approaching the subject as skeptics, couldn't close using the tools of their own field. Janiri's model doesn't resolve that gap by picking a side. It resolves it the way the Church's own procedure already assumes: by training both disciplines to recognize the edge of their own competence, and to hand a person across that edge to whoever is actually equipped to help them.

References

[^1]: Asturias, C. (2026, July 22). When Psychiatry Faces the Inexplicable. Two Doctors Delve Into Exorcisms; Both Confirm What the Church Says: The Devil Exists. ZENIT News.

[^2]: Gallagher, R. (2020). Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolical Attacks, and the Paranormal. HarperCollins.

[^3]: Code of Canon Law (1983), canon 1172; Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam (1999 typical edition).

[^4]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration of Psychology and Mental Health Practice. Divine Mercy University Press.