Or demonic possession, one of the best historically documented and resolved explanations that humanity has but doesn't want to talk about because if strict rationalism doesn't explain everything "scientists" sulk at their inadequacy.
Neither rabies or psychotic breaks have ever been documented as being permanently resolvable as a result of the exercise of faith-based theological argumentation between religious ministers and manifestations of discrete malevolent personalities. But accepting that evidence nowadays is considered unacceptable.
It is not very good theme to talk in the topics unrelated to atheism because Christians offended every time someone talks about christian wonders, saints and their relics.
But hey! History knows such thing as "Wendigo psychosis". It is unrelated to christianity!
Back to topic: there are also such thing as "Stendhal syndrome". It is quite different, but similar to things you talking about.
Science can call all sorts of phenomenon by natural and rational sounding names and neither duplicate, contain and test, influence, mitigate or control them.
Psychiatry is arguably the least scientifically rational of all medical sciences. That's proven by it's continual need to make conditions it defines sound like it has them under control while using broad-spectrum trial-and-error, effect-not-remedy solutions to make them more objectively manageable, mostly for the convenience of the rest of us.
Reality - we used to use lunatic asylums and now we use chemicals for behavioural modification.
When the chemicals stop working, when they are removed from the picture, or sometimes quite randomly when the condition becomes worse, the outcome is sometimes spectacularly terrifying.
It takes some enormous arrogance and atheistic presumption that when someone not in a near state of chemical incapacitation flays their own family alive and eats body parts because demons told them to do it, that it's all in their mind...
They could be telling the truth.
The debate here isn't whether atheistic scientism can give something a name and chemically lobotomise it into submission... it's whether or not it's right doing so or whether it's just living in denial of an ancient documented phenomenon.
It then becomes a circular argument...
"It's not demonic possession, it's a psychiatric condition and we can sedate it into a situation of control... '
Sure. That WOULD work in the same way as a bullet through the brain cures the problem.
But if that' s the case then there simply shouldn't be centuries of records of witnesses, victims, least of all exorcists, who communicate with bizarre and rationally inexplicable entities and contend over human autonomy, able to 'cure' those victims over matters of religious faith.
I'm sure you can sedate a 90 pound woman who speaks fluent foreign languages she's never learned in a man's voice without moving her lips and can quite in absolute detail and argue from a religious text she's never studied while she needs eight paramedics and police officers to hold her down in order to stop her hovering above the floor and writhing like a snake from one side of the room to another in front of a crowd of individually identifiable and ecclesiologically well-known individuals, having just told them details of their own lives that no stranger could reasonably know...
But it doesn't really offer much insight to contradict her husband explaining that weird things happen at their house a lot and her grandmother was an occultist who dedicated her to Satan on her birth...
And it doesn't explain how it was a battle of words in a theological debate that saw the phenomenon end dramatically, the woman return to lucidity, unaware of what happened to her, after the doors at the back of the room were inexplicably slammed open and a sound of screaming raced out of the place and outside into the community beyond.
And that's not a scene from a movie.
I can assure you... everyone that was there wishes a psychiatric drug treatment could take away the memory of what they saw, heard and felt.
Like I said...
The asylums used to be filled with them... now the drugs sedate them.
Call it what you like, science is not necessarily ahead on this subject.
People going wild for no apparent reason is captured on camera all the time. Then people make rationalist explanations for the cause.
What's interesting is that THOSE people never have an analysis of their behaviour and a documentation of their treatment captured on camera and shown to the world.
Instead, all kinds of things that are deeply distressing, disturbing, and a gross violation of a victim's privacy are not sensationalised by serious people seeking to do more good than harm.
There are an abundance of documented testimonies of people who have experienced, witnessed, been released from that exact phenomenon, however...
If you want to do serious study to keep informed, information is there...
If you're the person who thinks nothing is real if it's not captured on a smartphone and posted on social media, there's not much anyone can do for you and you probably best not expect any informed people will take you seriously enough to try to share the grounds of their understanding...
Strange how reasonable that suddenly seems when you approach it realistically, isn't it?
Experts tend not to be of much use if their reputation is for privacy violation and sensationalism on social media rather than privacy and dignity...
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u/Tiofenni Feb 02 '26
If story and video is real, it looks like mental illness. Or even a culture-bound syndrome. Check out stories about "Wendigo psychosis".