When the Spiritual Looks Clinical: Assessing Extraordinary Religious Experience

A client sits down and tells you that something outside them has taken hold. The language is religious, the fear is real, and the presentation does not fit neatly into any category you were trained to name. What do you do first?

In this course, a working exorcist walks through how he answers that question, and the answer is not what most people expect. Fr. José Antonio Fortea begins almost every evaluation the way any careful clinician would: he sits with the person, listens for a full hour, and forms a judgment about their mental health before he considers anything else. By his own account, most of the people who reach him are carrying psychological or psychiatric suffering, not possession. Only after the ordinary explanations have been weighed does he turn to the phenomenology of rare cases, and finally to prayer as a way of testing his impression.

For counselors and pastoral workers, the lecture is a compact case study in disciplined differential assessment. You will learn how to take a religiously framed presentation seriously without abandoning sound clinical judgment, how base-rate reasoning keeps the dramatic explanation in its place, and how to recognize the point at which the right move is to consult, collaborate, or refer. The enrichment readings translate the method into the language of contemporary assessment, drawing on Divine Mercy University’s faculty scholarship and the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, and root it in the older tradition of the discernment of spirits.